Bea Sylvan

The journey between these two moments is not really a story about abandoning ambition. It is a story about chasing what you love and making a career out of it.

Bea has always been ambitious. Growing up, she measured a lot of her achievement in grades and external validation. At the Stockholm School of Economics, she found herself surrounded by driven people and learned the value of putting in the work. What changed for Bea was where she chose to direct that hard work and ambition.

Today, Bea works as a DJ and is increasingly focusing on producing, singing, and writing her own music. Behind the performances is something that may sound surprisingly familiar to any business student: strategy, marketing, finances, networking, brand building, and a constant need to adapt and understand your audience.

Looking back, Bea sees a clear connection between the high-achieving student she once was and the artist and entrepreneur she is becoming. The difference is that she has found something she genuinely wants to work hard for.

A future that felt secure

We meet Bea in Testamentet, an Art Classroom created by Swedish artist Marie-Louise Ekman, a fitting setting for a conversation about creativity, ambition, and finding your own path.

Bea remembers first hearing about SSE when she was around 12. She was passing the School with her mother, who pointed toward the building and told her it was a very good school.

The idea stuck.

“I was always very focused on grades,” Bea says. “That was my thing. I think it was where I got a lot of my validation from, and it became a big part of my identity. Good grades and results got me validation.”

She liked mathematics and languages and knew she was good at many of the things school rewarded. There was also something appealing about aiming for a place that was difficult to get into.

But she did not arrive at SSE with a carefully planned career or idea what she wanted to do.

“I had no idea,” she says.

What she does remember is seeing the admission decision and feeling an enormous sense of relief.

“I thought, oh my God, now my future is secured. Whatever I do, it’s going to be fine.”

Once there, she found much more than that sense of security.

“I’m so glad I studied here,” she says. “It was one of the best times of my life.”

Bea became more involved in student life than she had expected and found herself surrounded by people who were ambitious, organized, and willing to work hard toward a goal. That environment changed something in her.

Learning to put in the work

Before SSE, Bea remembers thinking there was something almost uncool about trying too hard, being too dedicated to something. Ideally, you would study a little bit, enjoy your free time with friends and still get excellent grades.

At SSE, she began seeing achievement differently.

“The people who actually succeeded in the long run were the people who put in the work,” she says.

Talent mattered, but the students who kept working, preparing, and improving were often the ones who progressed furthest. And that lesson has followed her far beyond the classroom.

Today, it might mean taking a smaller DJ gig that does not look particularly glamorous from the outside, travelling far, putting something cringe on social media or working on something that may not generate an immediate boost or result.

She also learned the importance of understanding the fundamentals.

The exams that went best were not necessarily those she had prepared for by simply repeating old questions. They were the ones where she understood the underlying logic well enough to solve the problem in front of her.

She approaches music in a similar way. Understand the basics. Understand how the pieces fit together. Then build from there.

 

When ambition starts to narrow the options

Being surrounded by highly ambitious students could also create a different kind of pressure.

Bea arrived at SSE knowing little about many of the consulting firms and banks recruiting heavily from the school. By the end of her studies, she remembers feeling as though the definition of a successful career had become surprisingly narrow.

“It felt like there were maybe five-six companies you could imagine working for, and everything else was bad. Everyone competed for the same thing,” she says of her own experience at the time.

Her classmates themselves were supportive. What Bea remembers more strongly was the power of the recruitment environment and the way certain jobs gradually came to represent success.

She tried the more conventional route herself, including an internship and a “proper office job.” But something did not fit. At interviews, she remembers struggling to sound convincing about a field she simply was not interested in.

At the same time, watching highly driven classmates secure prestigious internships and jobs could make that mismatch feel like failure rather than useful information.

Only later did Bea start asking a different question: what if the problem was not that she had failed to fit the career, but that the career did not fit her?

Music was already there

Throughout her studies, Bea had been DJing on the side. She played at student parties, nightclubs, and smaller gigs. While many classmates were pursuing internships, she preferred to spend the summer playing music.

But she did not yet consider it a serious career. After her studies, she largely stopped.

She began working and tried to put DJing into the category of something fun she had done on the side. Then came the office moment.

Sitting with her coffee, Bea remembers looking at the life she was building and thinking:

“What am I doing?”

She missed music. So she gave herself permission to find out what would happen if she stopped treating it as a hobby and started treating it seriously.

“If I’m going to succeed, I have to go all in,” she remembers thinking. “It’s not like I’m going to become homeless. I just have to give it my all and try.”

The decision came quickly. The ambition had not disappeared. It had simply found somewhere new to go.

The business behind the DJ booth

Ask Bea what she does today and the answer has expanded beyond DJing.

She produces music, sings, and writes. The next phase of her career is increasingly focused on developing her own music and identity as an artist. But ask whether she sees herself as an artist, entrepreneur, or businessperson, and her first instinct is revealing.

“Entrepreneur, I think.”

From the outside, being a DJ can look like the time spent behind the decks. In reality, Bea describes a much bigger operation.

There is music to prepare and produce, but also bookings, emails, travel, accounting, meetings, networking, marketing, and the continuous work of building her identity as an artist.

In that sense, many of the things she learned at SSE have become unexpectedly practical.

“How to structure a working process, solve problems and make a plan for how to achieve the highest possible results is something I have learned at SSE.”

Marketing matters. Positioning matters. Understanding what makes you different matters. So does knowing which parts of the work you enjoy and which parts simply have to get done.

It is, essentially, running a small business where the product and the person are closely connected.

Reading the room is a form of leadership

There is another business-school comparison Bea has started thinking about: leadership. A DJ does not simply play songs. The job is to understand a room and take the people in it on a journey. A set may be carefully prepared, but the plan constantly interacts with reality.

The venue matters. The sound system matters. The time of day matters. The person playing next matters. Most importantly, the audience matters.

“You have to get people with you, a plan to get from A to B together with the crowd” Bea says.

During her summer in Ibiza, that became particularly clear.

Opening for Swedish House Mafia every Sunday at Ushuaïa meant playing for crowds where maybe not all people had heard of her. It also meant preparing them for the main act without simply trying to imitate what would come later.

Week by week, Bea experimented. She noticed which tracks worked, how the outdoor sound affected the music, what kind of energy and vibe the audience responded to. She adjusted while trying to maintain her own sound.

It was a lesson in preparation and instinct to understand that leading a room also means listening to it.

Being a woman in a male-dominated industry

That experience has also made Bea think more about what people expect a leader to look like. DJing remains heavily male-dominated, and Bea has become increasingly interested in how audiences respond not only to the music, but to the person delivering it.

She sees a parallel with traditional leadership environments.

“Qualities such as authority, confidence, directness, and taking up space are often perceived as masculine,” Bea argues. And those same qualities can affect how receptive an audience is to the person behind the decks.

Over the summer, she began thinking more consciously about how she presented herself on stage. She noticed that changes in clothing, body language, and how much space she appeared to take could change the way audiences responded.

For Bea, however, the goal is not simply to adopt a more masculine persona. It is another balancing act.

“I think I’m still trying to find what is most me and where I feel the most comfortable,” she says.

Understanding the dynamics of the industry can be strategic. Staying recognizable to herself matters just as much. It is a question she recognizes well from the corporate environment.

When hard work meets timing

Bea’s career moved quickly once she committed to DJing, but progress was not constant. After an initial period where new opportunities seemed to arrive one after another, things slowed down.

For several months, she felt stuck. She spent time in Mexico City working on music before returning to Stockholm in February, unsure what the next step would be.

Then, on a grey day in Stockholm, she noticed that Sebastian Ingrosso had started following her on social media. Soon afterwards, his team contacted her. They had seen a video of Bea DJing from a hot-air balloon and wanted to meet.

“Ingrosso called me and the whole situation felt like something out of a movie,” she says.

Meetings followed, as did an agonizing wait while Bea wondered whether anything would actually come of them. Then the answer arrived.

That summer, she became the opening DJ for Swedish House Mafia’s residency at Ushuaïa Ibiza, playing every Sunday. For someone accustomed to connecting achievement closely with effort, the experience also taught her to make room for something less controllable. Luck.

“It was the first time I really understood that you need a bit of luck in this industry as well,” she says.

The timing had aligned: the right people were looking at the right moment, and they happened to see her.

But Bea had also spent years learning the craft, accepting smaller gigs, building her profile, experimenting, and continuing through periods when the next step was unclear. Luck had arrived, but there was something for it to find.

“It was timing and luck,” she says. “So many things just aligned at the same time.”

Making more room for the artist

Now Bea is entering another phase. After a summer dominated by gigs, she wants to spend more time making and releasing her own music.

And that requires her to challenge some of the instincts that have helped build her career so far. The entrepreneur in Bea naturally asks questions such as: What is missing? What will work? What does the audience want? How should this be positioned?

The artist needs space for a different question. What do I want to make?

“I always think about what is needed rather than what I want,” she says. “I want to bring more of the distinctive artistic side into it.”

For someone who has spent much of her life being rewarded for identifying the goal and working toward it, that may be one of the more unfamiliar challenges.

Defining success for yourself

Bea’s advice to SSE students is therefore not to reject ambition, conventional careers, or fields such as finance and consulting.

“If that is what genuinely interests you, pursue it,” she says. What she wishes she had questioned earlier was the prestige attached to certain choices.

During her studies, people told her that there were many more possible careers than the handful of companies highlighted around her. She remembers the advice, but today, she understands it differently.

“Let go of the prestige,” she says. “Think about what you actually want to do. And a Bachelor degree from SSE will always provide you with a good foundation for your career.”

Enjoying the work does not remove the need for discipline. If anything, Bea believes it can make the willingness to work harder much stronger. That is perhaps the clearest connection between the student she was and the DJ she is today.

SSE taught her that ambition requires effort. Music helped her decide what she wanted that effort to be for. Her next ambition is characteristically uncomplicated.

“I want to release music and go out into the world and make a career as a DJ and music producer.”

This time, she is defining for herself what success should look like.