Kendra Ibsen, you received both a best study award and a best thesis award. What is your advice to students who want to become a winner of the study award next year?

It is all about prioritization and dedication. When I started my master I i.e. stopped working and decreased my involvement with SASSE. I had a clear goal to reach a GPA above 4,5, and I prioritized my life to succeed. My passion towards the field of management, the group dynamics and strategic thinking highly inspire me. I dedicated tons of energy and time into reading books and articles and I actually loved it. I appreciated the what I learned and become eager to learn even more. To get the best GPA in the Master's program in Management is not “a one woman show” since the semester's work involves different team work. I was part of great teams, which was driven by the will to succeed and to learn.

I am confident that all students at SSE can achieve high grades and my advice is to have strong will, focus, clear goals, openness, prioritization and real dedication. 

What’s the winning concept when writing a thesis?

For me it was extremely important to co-write the thesis with a classmate that I trusted, that I truly enjoyed working with and that complemented my skills. It was an obvious choice to work together with Tove Kjellén and I actually changed my exchange semester in order to make it happen.

Tove and I had set clear goals prior the thesis semester started. We carefully evaluated potential supervisors, case companies and interesting research fields. We knew that these factors were extremely important in order to deliver a very good thesis. The work was driven by curiosity, courage and good planning. It was a matter of writing, re-writing, writing and re-writing, changing theoretical frameworks, conclude, interpret and structure, over and over again. Simply, to be open to changes.

I know that our passion and curiosity for the field of research, the courage to question the thesis and each other, made this thesis excellent. I also want to highlight that we had a great “study life balance” as a result of good planning which also generated the best analysis and conclusions. Last but not least, we had fun when writing!

The following awards were presented during the evening:

Study Awards

• Accounting and Financial management: Thordis Lajewski
• Economics: Stefan Lautenbacher
• Finance: Paolo Frazzarin
• Business & Management – specialization Management: Kendra Ibsen
• Business & Management – specialization Marketing & Media Management: Julia Heller
• General Management: Mathilda Trygger
• International Business: August Bard Bringéus

Thesis Awards

Accounting & Financial Management:

• Helen Mou-Hua Sjöberg and Rasmus Westholm for their thesis Attractive Audit - Investigating attractiveness and height as determinants for auditor fees and compensation in a Swedish setting
• Sebastian Anesten and Niclas Möller for their thesis Complex Parsimony in Equity Valuation - An Empirical Assessment of Model Design and the Incremental Effects of Complexity

Economics:

• Lukas Kvissberg and Erik Polano for their thesis Fraternity, sorority and stereotyping: a field experiment examining gender dynamics in referral based hiring

Specialization in Management:

• Kendra Ibsen and Tove Kjellén for their thesis Management between art and commerce: Balancing competing institutional logics in cultural and creative industries: A case study of Bonnier Books

Finance:

• Emelie Jonsson and Owe Xie for their thesis Does profit-oriented ownership in the Swedish school sector affect its quality negatively – a quantitative panel study

Business & Management, Specialization Marketing & Media Management:

• ​​Iina-Maija Ikonen for her thesis Packaging as a Communicator of Brand Personality. Comparing the importance of the whole and the details

Capstone award, Master of Science in General Management:

• Peder Berggren and Christopher Kummelstedt for their thesis Capstone Project at Atlas Copco’s sustainability unit

Research project award - Master of Science in International Business:

• Martin Siltberg and Malin Adeborg for their thesis Working for the Man - A cross-sectional study of single industry towns' effect on entrepreneurship