Heading to Rio de Janeiro

As some of you already know I’ve decided to go on master study exchange to Ibmec Business School in Rio de Janeiro in February for 5 months. Below few reasons why I decided so and therefore gave up to few interesting job offers:

1) As you might remember from my earlier post I fell in love with Brazil during my two-week trip there last March. When I had a chance to go there for few months I didn’t need to think twice. Playing beach football and volley in Copacabana, meeting new friends, eating good meat, learning Portuguese and samba… Well, if you’ve been in Rio, you know.

2) I find Brazil as a very potential country and its worldwide importance will grow in future as raw materials and land come scarcer. Rio will host football World Cup in 2014 and Olympic Games in 2016. Do I still have to continue to pinpoint what I think of Rio in coming years…

3) I’ve had occasions during past decade where my life and freedom has been threatened. I’ve forgotten that too often and haven’t enjoyed my life fully. I’ve done many of my previous decisions based on rationality but this decision came directly from my heart. I also feel I’ve deserved a little break before beginning my long work career.

4) My home university isn’t exactly excelling in finance. However, Ibmec’s strength is finance that I hope to improve during my stay. Even if I wouldn’t work in finance in future it will always be my hobby that’s why I want to learn more about it.

5) I’ve always envied Brazilians relaxed and friendly attitude. I wish to catch some of it to my life as well.


I will do some freelancer jobs to Finland but otherwise concentrate on studying, self-improving and sports. I will be in Rio from February to June and go directly from there to South Africa via London to follow football World Cup with my friend Perttu.

The fall has been busy as always and the most of my time has taken CFA Global Investment Research Challenge where our job was to analyze a given company, write a report and present it to the panel of high-level judges. Our team consisting of Jussi Pajunen, Anssi Suikkanen and Juha-Pekka Tanila worked hard and we won the written part. However, we lost the final by judge votes and lost a spot in European final.

At the beginning of December there was also a launch of the new web portal of our company Virtua.fi. We had two good days in student fair and I’m optimistic about our service. I haven’t been really hands on creating the portal but our partners Ville Vine, Ilkka Bergius and external help Tomi Räsänen have done an excellent job. Virtua.fi is an education portal that offers coaching courses to people applying for business and medical universities. Courses include virtual lectures, practices and community. Hopefully this is just the beginning and I have high expectations to our team.

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- Mikael