Pepp – mentorship program

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Earlier this semester, I joined a mentorship program through KTH which is called Pepp. Pepp has created a mentorship program where girls in high school are connected to female engineering students. The engineering student tries to inspire and give insights about how the school is, why you should pursue a technical education and maybe share their own journey to university. The engineering students also have their own mentor which is a young professional that can give insights how career and life has been after graduation and share job experiences.

Last week I went to an event with Pepp where we went to a company called Cygni and had a seminar about mentorship. We had discussions on what mentorship has meant to us but also the differences of being a mentee and a mentor. I would recommend you to find a mentor if you feel that you need guidance in your future career. Since I joined this mentorship program, I have met other female engineering students from KTH that have shared their stories and dreams. Also, I have met a lot of young professionals that have shared their experiences.

I think it is really good to have a mentor because you create a relationship with a person that can guide you. The mentor and mentee relationship is not the same as the relationship you have with a friend, because you can talk about self-developing, career and other things you might not do with your other friends. The mentor also has the ability to give new perspective to things as she probability already been through the same journey. When having a startup, a mentor can be very valuable and give good support when you need to take big decisions.

 

Pepp-logga

You can read more about Pepp here: http://www.blipepp.nu/ (however, it is only in Swedish)

Weekend at Create-Squared

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Last weekend friends of mine and I went to the create-squared event for a taste of so called business hackathon. At Norrsken House, students who came across Sweden and mentors who came with good entrepreneurship experiences meet together for the theme of ‘Closing the Loop’. After keynote speaker Alexander Verbeek gave his inspirational talk on sustainability, 2 days of innovative workings began.

Ideas generated varied a lot: food waste concerns, industrial waste concerns, suicide preventions, sustainable fashions, crime hotmaps, you name it. Mingling and voting were along with team forming, thus, the teams got diverse skill sets.

The team which I was in was one with a full skill set: entrepreneur, sale, economy, front-end, and back-end. Concerning about shopping locally, we were working on developing a location based product searching engine aimed for physical shopping. I was so lifted by their enthusiasms on entrepreneurship and sustainability thinking.

It was a great experience on such innovative and collaborative event and entrepreneurial team cooperation. Even though we did not manage to win the competition, it was memorable. The gold went to the B2B industrial waste market platform, while the silver went to the edible cutlery team which was of our classmates @Jingjing and @Shruti. Applause!

See http://create-squared.com/ for facts. Applause for our classmate @Dora as the organizing team member!

“Don’t try to be original, just try to be good.” — Paul Rand, Graphic Designer

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Up to a few weeks ago my stereotype image, probably influenced by background in mechanical engineering, of an entrepreneur starting a company was somebody that has a brilliant idea that could disrupt a market and strives for a “blue ocean” strategy, potentially something Aileen Lee would describe as a unicorn.

A few weeks ago, I started a group work with some classmates for a course I was taking at SSE. It turned out that one of them, Matilda, was actually 6 months in to the journey of starting a company called bSaka (you can visit their website here bSaka). I immediately though she was some kind of Swedish version of Mark Zuckerberg but this was not the case: the company goal is to help people live a life of harmony and happiness and it does this through the commercialization of clothes. These clothes are designed to support people during meditation activities such as yoga and are manufactured with a strong concern for sustainability. All this sounded great but I was still skeptical about the potential of such a company: Where was the disruptive technology? Where was the app? How can you compete with companies like Zara or Nike? What is better in them compared to incumbent players?

Recently the company held a start-up launching event and a new product was launched so I got to hear the story behind the company and the reasons that pushed this group of friends to engage in such a tough venture. Matilda had gone though some rough times that she had overcome through meditation and yoga. She found out that with a more harmonic and less frenetic life she was feeling much better, there company’s goal is to support people in this journey of self-awareness. Matilda speech was quite impressive and you could feel the inner motivation, there I realized that being an entrepreneur does not necessarily mean being original and having a disruptive technology to leverage but is mostly about trying to be good at what you do and passionate about it.