Olga Melekhina

ESMT Berlin

“Former transactional lawyer who gets irrationally excited about fiber sorting technologies.”

Hometown: I am originally from Moscow, Russia. I consider Berlin to be my home now.

Fun fact about yourself: I launched my circular fashion career on Vinted one week ago. I have since sold most of my unworn wardrobe and spent three times that amount buying other people’s. I am calling it market research.

Undergraduate School and Degree: Lomonosov Moscow State University, Master of Business Law

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? Ozon, one of the largest e-commerce platforms in the CIS; Lead Associate, Finance & M&A Transactions

Where did you intern during the summer of 2025? Instead of an internship, I pursued a Sustainability in Practice project, which is a sustainability consulting project embedded in my MBA curriculum. Together with my MBA team, we developed a biodiversity index for the coffee industry for Nespresso.

Where will you be working after graduation? I have decided to first pursue a Responsible Leadership Fellowship, which is an opportunity sponsored by ESMT Berlin to support an NGO whose cause I consider very impactful and important. For four months, I will be developing an assessment framework for scaling textile-to-textile recycling across EU markets with an NGO active in this area.

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School:

* President, Net Impact ESMT Berlin, Berlin chapter of the global impact leadership community (March 2025 – present). I have organized a climate tech hackathon, which was a big success, and a few events related to careers in sustainability; consulted an asset manager on launching a biodiversity investment fund; advocated for impact.

* I have been awarded a Responsible Leadership Fellowship, which will allow me to pursue a four-month project with an NGO whose mission is to accelerate textile-to-textile recycling.

* Together with other students, I have been awarded a Sustainability Action Grant, which has allowed us to organize a climate tech hackathon uniting students and young professionals to work on a challenge of retrofitting buildings in Berlin.

* I have been awarded a Women in Business scholarship by ESMT Berlin for my achievements in my career, which has covered part of my tuition.

* I have been selected to participate in a semester exchange at IE Madrid, where I pursued courses related to entrepreneurship and sustainability.

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? Two things stand out. The first is the climate tech hackathon I organized at ESMT Berlin earlier this year. Two weeks before the event, we had around five sign-ups. I spent those two weeks heavily promoting the event, and we ended up with 35+ participants and an amazing group of mentors and judges. People still message me great feedback about the event.

The second is more personal. I worked on Ryza, a circular fashion platform, during my exchange at IE Madrid, and we made it to the finals of IE Venture Day. I met Caro, Ryza’s founder, on day two of my exchange. We got talking, and it clicked. I was not sure I could complete the triple jump into circularity just by doing an MBA, but turns out: I could! And it seems like this career is following me even when I decide that I am not going to pursue it.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? In March 2020, everyone had just been sent home, and my team at the law firm was in the middle of closing a €2 billion financing deal. We finished it from our kitchen tables, working day and night for several weeks, in unprecedented circumstances.

When we got to funding, the borrower called me, laughing and saying thank you. I was working for the banks, sitting on the opposite side of his table, and he still picked up the phone. I think that says something about how I work: whatever the circumstances, I find a way to get it done, and sometimes people notice, and this feels nice.

Why did you choose this business school? I chose ESMT Berlin because of the opportunities offered for students interested in entrepreneurship and its location. Berlin is not just one of the major start-up hubs in Europe — it also has a very high concentration of circular economy start-ups and initiatives, as well as impact investors. Being able to build a network and attend events that are highly relevant for me is something no other school could offer.

Who was your favorite MBA professor? Eric Quintane teaches Organizational Behavior. His class spanned two connected ideas: the formal architecture of organizations and the informal networks that make them work. In the network analysis sessions, he showed us how to make hidden structures visible: who holds informal influence, where information really flows, and where change stalls. My pals Ellen and Sophia, and I left so inspired by the applications of network theory that we began seriously exploring building a venture around it.

What was your favorite course as an MBA?

It was Managerial Analysis and Decision Making, taught by Prof. Francis de Véricourt. It was one of the first courses of the MBA. The premise is that humans are bad at making decisions, and here is how to get better. We went through the mechanics of decision trees and framing problems under uncertainty, but what stuck was the part on biases and psychological traps — the ways our intuition systematically leads us astray. In one session, we had the case where two experts were debating the climate change risks facing a business. Before Francis introduced the framework for analyzing their arguments, I found myself close to the skeptic’s side. That was a humbling moment.

The course turned out to be very durable, with many frameworks and concepts from that course used in future courses throughout the MBA.

What was your favorite MBA event or tradition at your business school? Every December, ESMT sets up outside with Glühwein and pretzels. It is cold, and it is simple. This year, there was a Christmas tree where you could pin a note with something you were grateful for. I wrote my new MBA friends and my new Bedlington Terrier. At the same event, Net Impact ran its annual fundraiser. We cooked Taiwanese and Italian food and sold it to raise money for the cause.

What was the most impactful case study you had in business school and what was the biggest lesson you learned from it? The change management simulation in Professor Quintane’s class was very impactful. We were playing either the CEO or the director of product innovation at a sunglass manufacturer tasked with implementing an organization-wide environmental sustainability initiative. We quickly discovered that the change itself (switching to greener inputs, addressing waste) is the easy part. The hard part is the human system around it: which stakeholders resist, who are your hidden champions, and who are quietly undermining your efforts, and where does informal authority sit. I learned that a change strategy that ignores informal power is not a strategy. I hope to use this knowledge when I am working on circularity transformation.

What did you love most about your business school’s town? The startup scene in Berlin is world-class. The cultural life is unlike anywhere I have lived and you can find virtually any cuisine. I moved to Berlin in 2024 and already know I am staying for this chapter of my life.

What business leader do you admire most? Ellen MacArthur. She was at the absolute peak of her sailing career and walked away from it because she had become consumed by a different problem — the way we make and waste things. I find that more interesting than most business leader stories. She started from scratch in a field that barely existed. I see parallels in my own story: leaving something you’re good at for something that matters more is hard, but fulfilling.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? ESMT had dedicated courses on AI (e.g., From Analytics to AI and Evidence-Based Management). But honestly, the real education happened in our study groups, when we were constantly sharing new models and tools.

The biggest shift for me was realizing that with AI, the limiting factor in knowledge work is no longer your experience. I am now genuinely confident I can take on almost any type of work, because the combination of transferable skills and knowing how to prompt well gets you surprisingly far. I hope HR managers get up to speed on this soon.

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? I had to flip a coin for this one, so it’s Ellen Salpietro. Engineer-turned-venture-builder, obsessed with closing the gap between academic research and real-world commercialization. Her brain is amazing.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list?

1. Build or lead a circular economy venture from early stage to meaningful scale.
2. Sit on the board of directors of a circular economy venture.

What made Olga such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2026?

“Olga Melekhina has been one of the most driven and impactful MBA students I have worked with in recent years. I first got to know her through her strong interest in sustainability and supervised her in the MBA Sustainability in Practice project with Nespresso. There, she worked on developing a biodiversity index and, importantly, on building the business case for biodiversity. She was able to connect ecological insight with clear managerial thinking and delivered work that was both rigorous and practical. As President of the Net Impact Club at ESMT, part of a global student network that promotes using business as a force for good, she built strong links with companies in our Sustainable Business Roundtable, organized and fundraised for major events such as Hack the Future of Sustainable Impact, and consistently created opportunities for her peers to engage with sustainability in action. She also introduced and contributed to a public discussion on biodiversity and business with a natural scientist, where she helped connect science and management in a meaningful way.

What stands out most is her drive to go beyond the curriculum, actively seeking additional projects and real-world engagement while managing the full demands of the MBA. She combines strong organization and leadership skills with intellectual curiosity and a clear commitment to sustainable business.”

Joanna Radeke
Director of the ESMT Institute for Sustainable Transformation and Director of Sustainability
ESMT Berlin

DON’T MISS: MBAS TO WATCH: CLASS OF 2026

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