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mbaMission’s Insider’s Guide Booth School of Business University of Chicago Chicago, IL
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Introduction
After more than a decade helping MBA applicants get Over the past eight years, Poets&Quants has be- into top business schools, we have learned what can come the foremost authority on the top business compel an admissions committee to send that cov- schools. Our mission has always been to help young eted letter of acceptance. Selecting the right MBA professionals with one of the most important—and program for your needs and developing a true un- potentially most expensive—decisions of their lives: derstanding of and familiarity with that program are whether to pursue an MBA. crucial in crafting a successful application. We have therefore invested hundreds of hours into research- This Insider’s Guide is part of a new editorial part- ing and examining the leading business schools—in- nership between Poets&Quants and mbaMission, cluding speaking with students, alumni, and other the world’s leading MBA admissions consulting frm. representatives—to construct these guides, with the We closely evaluated all such guides currently on the express goal of helping applicants like you make in- market, and I am confdent that you will not fnd a formed decisions about this important step in your more thorough analysis of an MBA program than education and career. mbaMission’s. These in-depth reports are well re-
searched and well written, offering the detail and
We hope you enjoy this guide and encourage you to examination applicants need to really understand visit us at www.mbamission.com for complete and de- a school’s culture, offerings, and outcomes. We are tailed analysis of the leading schools’ essay questions, thrilled to offer these guides to our readers for free, weekly essay-writing tips, MBA news and trends, and thanks to our new partnership. other valuable free information and resources. And for any advice you may need on applying to business Moreover, the guides are a great complement to the school, please contact us for a free 30-minute consul- daily coverage of MBA news, students, programs, tation. Our consultants are extensively trained to help and admissions practices on PoetsandQuants.com. applicants present themselves in the most interesting We hope you will visit our site often to stay informed and compelling way and take advantage of every op- about the programs that interest you and the one you portunity that might increase their chances of being ultimately attend. We will continue to provide the admitted to their target MBA program. most relevant and current resources on the MBA world
to help you make the best possible decisions on your
Jeremy Shinewald path from school selection to career advancement. [email protected] www.mbamission.com I wish you the best of luck on your journey to what will
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Free Resources from mbaMission
The following guides are also available from mbaMission (online at https://shop.mbamission.com/collections/ guides), and more are being added regularly:
Admissions Guides • Complete Start-to-Finish MBA Admissions • Optional Essays Guide
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Insider’s Guides • Insider’s Guide to Columbia Business School • Insider’s Guide to the Stanford Graduate
• Insider’s Guide to Cornell University’s School of Business
Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of • Insider’s Guide to the Stephen M. Ross School
Management of Business at the University of Michigan
• Insider’s Guide to Duke University’s Fuqua • Insider’s Guide to the Tuck School of Business
School of Business at Dartmouth
• Insider’s Guide to the Haas School of • Insider’s Guide to the UCLA Anderson School
Business at the University of California- of Management
Berkeley • Insider’s Guide to the University of Chicago
• Insider’s Guide to Harvard Business School Booth School of Business
• Insider’s Guide to INSEAD • Insider’s Guide to the University of Virginia’s
• Insider’s Guide to the Kellogg School of Darden School of Business Administration
Management at Northwestern University • Insider’s Guide to the Wharton School of the
• Insider’s Guide to the MIT Sloan School of University of Pennsylvania
Management • Insider’s Guide to the Yale School of
• Insider’s Guide to New York University’s Management
Leonard N. Stern School of Business
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Interview Primers • Chicago Booth School of Business Interview • Northwestern Kellogg Interview Primer
Primer • NYU Stern School of Business Interview
• Columbia Business School Interview Primer Primer
• Dartmouth Tuck Interview Primer • Stanford GSB Interview Primer
• Duke Fuqua Interview Primer • Wharton School of the University of
• Haas School of Business Interview Primer Pennsylvania Interview Primer
• Harvard Business School Interview Primer • UCLA Anderson Interview Primer
• INSEAD Interview Primer • UVA Darden Interview Primer
• London Business School Interview Primer • Yale School of Management Interview Primer
• Michigan Ross Interview Primer
• MIT Sloan School of Management Interview
Primer
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• ESADE Program Primer • London Business School Program Primer
• HEC Paris Program Primer • Rotman School of Management Program
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Career Primers • Asset Management Career Primer • Private Equity Career Primer
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The mbaMission blog is updated daily and offers a plethora of MBA admissions tips, business school news, company updates, event listings, and other valuable information. Be sure to also follow us on Twitter (@mbaMission),
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Table of Contents
9 Te MBA Program in Context: Choosing Chicago Booth 10 Location: Urban Campus Versus College Town 14 Class Size: Smaller Versus Larger 18 Curriculum: Flexible Versus Mandatory Core 21 Pedagogy: Lecture Versus Case Method 23 Academic Specializations/Recruitment Focus: Resources and Employers 27 Alumni Base: Opportunities to Engage 29 Facilities: Shaping the Academic/Social Experience 30 Rankings and Reputation: Important Metrics or Arbitrary Measures?
36 Booth School of Business 36 Summary 37 Te Dean 39 Professional Specializations 39 Consulting 41 Entrepreneurship, Private Equity, and Venture Capital
44 Finance 47 International Business 50 Marketing 53 Nonproft/Social Entrepreneurship 55 Notable Professors and Unsung Heroes 58 Social/Community Life 60 Academic Summary 62 Admissions Basics 66 University of Chicago (Booth) Essay Analysis, 2017–2018 70 mbaMission’s Exclusive Interview with University of Chicago Booth School of Business Associate Dean of Student Recruitment and Admissions Kurt Ahlm 73 Insider Interview: Alumna, University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Class of 2012
80 Appendix: Chicago Booth Facts and Figures 80 Basics 80 Class Profle (Class of 2019) 81 Employment Statistics (Class of 2017)
84 Bibliography Te MBA Program in Context: Choosing Chicago Booth
Over the years, we have met many aspiring MBA students who have tried to You may not fnd a identify their target schools and quickly become overwhelmed, wondering, single program that “How are the top MBA programs really different?” and “How do I choose the meets all your needs one that is right for me?” and preferences, but you should be able to Frustrated, some applicants ultimately choose schools based simply on identify ones that fulfll rankings or the opinions of friends or alumni. Although these inputs have a the factors that are place in your evaluative process, you should also do the necessary research most important to you. to fnd the program that is truly best for your personality and professional needs. In doing so, you will fnd signifcant differences between, for exam- ple, programs that have a class size in the low 200s and those that have classes of more than 900 students. As you are undoubtedly already aware, an MBA is a signifcant investment in the short term and a lifetime connection to an institution in the long term. We therefore strongly encourage you to take time now to think long and hard about this decision and thoroughly consider your options. We hope this guide will prove helpful to you in doing just that.
At mbaMission, we advise candidates evaluating their potential target schools to consider the following eight specifc characteristics (in no particular order) that shape MBA programs:
1. Location: Urban Campus Versus College Town
2. Class Size: Smaller Versus Larger
3. Curriculum: Flexible Versus Mandatory Core
4. Pedagogy: Lecture Versus Case Method
5. Academic Specializations/Recruitment Focus: Resources and Employers
6. Alumni Base: Opportunities to Engage
7. Facilities: Shaping the Academic/Social Experience
8. Rankings and Reputation: Important Metrics or Arbitrary Measures?
You will not likely fnd a single MBA program that meets all your needs and preferences across these eight criteria, but you should be able to identify schools that fulfll the factors that are most important to you. Although this guide is intended to familiarize you on a deeper level with this particular school, nothing will prove more valuable in your decision making than visiting the programs that appeal to you and experiencing them frsthand. Inevitably, no matter what your research may reveal, some schools will simply “click” with you, and others will not.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Note: The authors and editors at mbaMission have made every effort to ensure the accuracy and timeliness of the information included in this guide. However, some discrepancies may exist or develop over time between what is presented here and what appears in the school’s offcial materials, as well as what may be offered by other content providers in print or online. For the most up-to-date information, always check with your target school directly. The opinions expressed by the people interviewed are those of the attributed individuals only and may not necessarily represent the opinion of mbaMission or any of its affliates.
We also wish to thank the students, alumni, faculty members, and administrators who gave generously of their time to provide valuable input for this guide.
1. Location: Urban Campus Versus College Town
Pursuing an MBA can be quite intense, and the environment and community Te environment surrounding the campus can profoundly affect and even shape your MBA and community experience. For example, imagine stepping out of a class at New York Univer- surrounding your sity’s (NYU’s) Stern School of Business and into the energetic bustle of New chosen school can York City’s West Village. Now imagine walking outside after a course at the profoundly afect and Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and being surrounded by the tranquil- shape your MBA ity and natural beauty of New Hampshire’s Upper Valley. Neither scenario is experience. necessarily “better” than the other, but one might appeal to you more.
An urban campus can undoubtedly offer social and cultural opportunities that a college town simply cannot match.
This is not to suggest, however, that college towns are devoid of culture—indeed, intense intellectual and cultural programs exist in college towns precisely because the academic institution is at the core of the community.
While schools in college towns tout their close-knit atmosphere and the tight bonds classmates form in such a setting, this environment can be welcoming for some students and overwhelming for others. In contrast, urban campuses are more decentralized, with students often living in various parts of a city and even in the surrounding suburbs. Someone who has a greater need for privacy or personal space might therefore prefer an urban environ- ment. In addition, in major urban centers, some students—particularly those who lived in the city before enrolling
Urban Campus Schools Urban/College Hybrid Schools College Town Schools
Chicago Booth Northwestern Kellogg Cornell Johnson Columbia Business School Stanford GSB Dartmouth Tuck Harvard Business School UC Berkeley Haas Duke Fuqua MIT Sloan UCLA Anderson Michigan Ross NYU Stern Yale SOM UVA Darden UPenn Wharton
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 in business school—may already have well-developed social groups, and this scenario may again be better for those who fnd an academically and socially all-encompassing environment less attractive.
One aspect of the MBA experience that candidates often fail to consider when evaluating their school options is weather. Although factoring climate into your school choice may initially seem superfcial, if you know you cannot comfortably manage frigid conditions or soaring temperatures, certain programs should be stricken from your list. We encounter many applicants each year who wisely stave off a potentially miserable experience by choosing to not apply to certain schools in locations they just do not feel are “livable” for them.
In addition, housing costs are one expense that many applicants do not stop to consider before choosing a school to target. By researching real estate prices at the top programs, we found that the cost differential between rent- ing a one-bedroom apartment in a Midwestern college town and renting one in New York City, for example, can be quite signifcant—adding up to tens of thousands of dollars on a cumulative basis across two years. This is an important factor to include as you weigh your options and calculate your projected budget.
In summary, a college town can be appealing for some candidates because its smaller size tends to create strong bonds within the business school’s community, though for others, the lack of privacy could be undesired or over- whelming. Furthermore, some fnd a slower pace of life calming and comfortable, whereas others crave the energy and bustle of a city. If you strongly prefer one or the other, you should be able to quickly eliminate certain schools from your list.
Average Monthly Rent for a One-Bedroom Apartment
NYU Stern New York, NY $3,157 within .20 mile radius of campus
MIT Sloan Cambridge, MA $3,041 within .75 mile radius of campus
Harvard Business School Cambridge, MA $2,777 within .33 mile radius of campus
UCLA Anderson Los Angeles, CA $2,684 within .50 mile radius of campus
Stanford GSB Stanford, CA $2,577 within 1.50 mile radius of campus
UC Berkeley Haas Berkeley, CA $2,349 within .75 mile radius of campus
Columbia Business School New York, NY $2,134 within .50 mile radius of campus
UPenn Wharton Philadelphia, PA $1,396 within .75 mile radius of campus
Michigan Ross Ann Arbor, MI $1,292 within .50 mile radius of campus
Northwestern Kellogg Evanston, IL $1,291 within .75 mile radius of campus
Chicago Booth Chicago, IL $1,270 within 1.0 mile radius of campus
Yale SOM New Haven, CT $1,240 within .50 mile radius of campus
Dartmouth Tuck Hanover, NH $1,186 within 3.0 mile radius of campus
Duke Fuqua Durham, NC $1,140 within 1.5 mile radius of campus
Cornell Johnson Ithaca, NY $992 within .75 mile radius of campus
UVA Darden Charlottesville, VA $826 within 1.50 mile radius of campus
According to Rentometer.com, accessed May 2018.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Chicago, Illinois, known as the “Second City” (a nickname established when the city was the second most populous one in the country after New York City), boasts a population of just over 9.5 million in its greater metropolitan area. So, rather than discussing everything that a city the size of Chicago has to offer—and it indeed offers plenty in terms of arts and entertainment (several major sports teams, the world-renowned
Art Institute of Chicago, and a stunning array of architectural styles amid rows of towering skyscrapers, just to scratch the surface)—we will focus on the neighborhoods in which students at the University of
Chicago Booth School of Business primarily study and live, starting with Hyde Park, where the business school is located.
For years, Hyde Park was maligned as a dangerous part of Chicago, but the neighborhood has gentrifed signifcantly and appears to have even earned some cachet. Hyde Park is now perhaps best known for being the Chicago home of a certain former Illinois senator who became President of the United States.
Some Chicago Booth students are not concerned about Hyde Park’s safety but told mbaMission that the area is fairly quiet at night and that students who do not live downtown might miss out on all that Chicago has to offer. Still, Hyde Park has its charms, being a neighborhood where both professors and student families live, and it is economical, with one-bedroom apartments costing approximately $1,200 per month
(according to real estate website Trulia.com), compared with approximately $1,900 per month downtown.
Students who live in the neighborhood told mbaMission about eating at Medici on 57th, a pizzeria with a rooftop balcony, and hanging out toward the end of the week at The Pub at the University of Chicago’s Ida
Noyes Hall.
Within Hyde Park, a notable number of students reside in the Regents Park high-rise complex, where monthly rents for studio apartments start at $1,250, and three-bedroom apartments start at $2,350.
Booth Partners, the school’s club for the signifcant others and families of Chicago Booth students, re- cently reported that 60% of students live downtown in the Loop/Lakeshore East area and approximately
12% live in South Loop. The Gold Coast/Streeterville and River North areas attract approximately 10% of students each, and roughly 5% of students live both in the Hyde Park and the Lincoln Park/Wicker Park/
Logan Square areas.
A popular housing option for Chicago Booth students, according to the club, is a building called Aqua, a spectacular 87-story high-rise, built to comply with LEED green building certifcation from the U.S. Green
Building Council. Students who want to relax after a tough day can swim in one of the facility’s pools, watch a movie in the media room, work out in the ftness center, or just enjoy the view from the observation deck. At Aqua, which is located approximately 35 minutes from campus on the “L” (Chicago’s elevated sub- way system), students pay between approximately $1,800 and $2,700 per month for a studio and between
$4,100 and $5,100 per month for a two-bedroom apartment.
Commenting on the preference many students have for downtown living, one frst year wrote in an April
2013 post on her personal blog, “MBAs have been out of school for at least three years (some of us even 10+
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 years) and have become used to living a certain way. If we have the opportunity to maintain that lifestyle
(lack of income and debt be damned), we’re going to do it. Hyde Park is lovely, but most of us just aren’t about that 2.5 kids, Sunday at the park life quite yet. Chicago’s public transportation makes it easy to com- mute to school and we have lockers so that we can keep the stuff we need on campus to avoid extra trips.
Given these conveniences, we choose to live where Chicago’s night life does.” One frst year who had en- rolled in the program with their partner wrote in a November 2016 guest post on the Booth Experience blog:
“Residing in the Loop neighborhood has proved to be the perfect urban adventure, offering us quick access to restaurants, shops, museums, and Chicago hallmarks. Exploring the city is our favorite pastime activity.”
Regardless of where students choose to live—and according to much of the information shared in the Chi- cago Booth admissions chats we consulted, more and more seem to choose downtown—taking advantage of everything Chicago has to offer is reportedly quite easy. Said one frst year in a January 2012 admissions chat, “Most Booth students live downtown in the Loop, due to more access to activities, restaurants, and shopping, and make use of the Metra [the northeast Illinois commuter rail system] to get to campus on a daily basis.” And in January 2015, a student contributor to The Booth Experience blog discussed the advan- tages and disadvantages of living in Hyde Park, referring to the area simply as “the perfect place to live.”
In recent years, Booth Partners has claimed that approximately 20% of students with families live in uni- versity housing. Graduate student housing is offered in 28 buildings on a frst-come, frst-served basis and is available in the Hyde Park area, with units from effciencies to three-bedroom apartments. In addition, international students have the option of residing at International House. This residence hall is open to all students at the University of Chicago, although the residence population is largely made of graduate students. Annual rents at International House range from approximately $8,211 for a double to $9,435 for a single or a suite. International House was temporarily closed for construction during the summer of 2018, and will be re-opened in the summer of 2019.
One international student with whom mbaMission spoke cautioned that some prospective students may not realize how expensive the city of Chicago can be: his rent in the typically pricey Gold Coast area, in the north side of the city, was $1,700 per month for a one-bedroom apartment. He added that he also had to stop taking public transportation to campus because the trip was taking him a full hour; instead, he bought a car, which reduced his commute to 35 minutes.
Chicago Booth represents an urban campus within a large city, thereby offering its students both neigh- borhood and downtown living. Candidates should consider how they feel about a decentralized community
(and possibly a signifcant commute) when deciding whether to apply to the school. Further, applicants might consider whether the general ambience of a major metropolis is ideal for their personal lifestyle as well as their study style.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 2. Class Size: Smaller Versus Larger
Another element that affects the character of a school’s MBA experience is Refect on your past class size. You might want to refect on your high school, college, and work academic and work environments to help you determine whether you would be more comfort- environments to able in a larger class or a smaller one—or whether this is even a consider- determine whether ation for you at all. you would be more comfortable in a larger Students at smaller schools (which we defne as having approximately 350 or smaller class%or students or fewer per class) tend to interact with most of their peers and whether this is a professors at some point during the typical two-year MBA period. Thus, the consideration for you smaller schools are generally considered more “knowable,” and their com- at all. munities tend to be quite closely knit. Also, consider that assuming a leader- ship position is easier in a smaller environment, because, for example, the
Finance Club may have only one president at both a small school and a large school, but competition for such a position would obviously be greater in the larger program.
Some individuals might prefer to be at a larger school where they can better maintain their anonymity if they so choose. A student at a school with close to 900 people or more in each class will not likely get to know each and every one of his/her classmates by the end of the program, and some people might prefer this. Further, advocates
of larger classes tout the advantage of being able to
Class Size interact with more people during one’s MBA experi-
900 to 1,000 Harvard Business School ence—and to thereby develop a broader and more
800 to 900 UPenn Wharton robust network of peers. Note that many schools di-
700 to 800 Columbia Business School1 vide students into smaller groups—called “sections,”
500 to 600 Chicago Booth “clusters,” “cohorts,” or even “oceans”—in which ap-
400 to 500 Northwestern Kellogg proximately 60–90 students take certain classes to- Duke Fuqua gether, and this approach can help foster a stronger Michigan Ross sense of community within the larger programs. Stanford GSB MIT Sloan
300 to 400 NYU Stern With a class of approximately 580 (582 in the Class UCLA Anderson of 2019), Chicago Booth is one of the country’s larger Yale SOM UVA Darden MBA programs. Although a class of this size is too
200 to 300 Dartmouth Tuck big to allow every student to truly get to know one UC Berkeley Haas another, Chicago Booth is contained within a single Cornell Johnson building—the Harper Center—which has a massive
Schools are listed in order from largest class to smallest within public meeting space at its core, and this helps facili- each category. tate and encourage student interaction.
1 Includes J-Term students.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 School (Class of 2019) Women International Minorities
Chicago Booth 40% 36% 27%1
Columbia Business School 41% 43% 34%1
Cornell Johnson 31% 33% 31%1
Dartmouth Tuck 44% 29% 23%1
Duke Fuqua2 35% 39% 20%
Harvard Business School 42% 35%3 25%1,3
Michigan Ross 43% 34% 23%
MIT Sloan 42% 33% NA
Northwestern Kellogg 42% 35% 25%1
NYU Stern 38% 37%4 29%
Stanford GSB 40% 41%3,4 29%1
UC Berkeley Haas 40% 39% 29%1
UCLA Anderson 38% 30% 28%
UPenn Wharton 44% 33% 33%1
UVA Darden 39% 34% 20%1
Yale SOM 43% 45%3,4 27%1,3
1 Specifed as U.S. minorities.
2 Fuqua offers statistics on its website to represent a “typical” class.
3 Includes permanent U.S. residents.
4 Includes dual citizens.
Chicago Booth does not divide its incoming students into dedicated sections for the frst full year of its
MBA program, but all students must participate in the LEAD (Leadership Effectiveness and Development)
Program and are divided into sections of approximately 60 for that purpose. LEAD begins two to three
weeks before the start of the frst semester and ends just before the semester ends. In the LEAD class,
students are further divided into small squads (of six to eight members) and participate in a variety of
team-building experiences on- and off-site. A second year wrote in a 2016 Booth Experience blog post that
the LEAD program “is a dynamic course where frst-year students focus on developing the most critical
aspects of leadership—cultivating support and infuencing others, understanding different working styles
and motivating diverse teams, presenting ideas, and managing under crisis. At Booth, we believe these
skills simply can’t be learned in a traditional academic setting, so LEAD is a fully experiential program
where frst-year students are constantly challenging themselves to practice these skills and incorporate
feedback from each other to improve.”
Some students reported to mbaMission that they appreciate the LEAD course as an opportunity for so-
cialization, and some of the program’s student sections—or the “squads” within them—arrange reunions
to stay in touch with one another after the program is over. An alumnus we interviewed who had been a
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Most Common Undergraduate Major for Incoming Students (Class of 2019)
Chicago Booth Business 27%
Columbia Business School Tied: Business, Social Science 32%
Cornell Johnson Business 34%
Dartmouth Tuck Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences 55%
Duke Fuqua NA NA
Harvard Business School Economics/Business 45%
Michigan Ross Economics/Business 36%
MIT Sloan Engineering 32%
Northwestern Kellogg Economics/Business 49%
NYU Stern Business 36%
Stanford GSB Humanities/Social Sciences 44%
UC Berkeley Haas Business 21%
UCLA Anderson Business 27%
UPenn Wharton Humanities 41%
UVA Darden NA NA
Yale SOM Humanities and Social Sciences 30%
LEAD Facilitator (as well as student club co-chair and an Admissions Fellow) pinpointed the course as one
of the most impressive elements of his business school experience. “I thought that all three activities were
great,” he said, “but being a LEAD Facilitator was where I got to practice my public speaking and build great
bonds with my squad.”
Another Facilitator wrote in a 2016 blog post: “LEAD facilitators serve a role as ‘bridge’ between frst-
year students and second-year students. In true Booth give-back fashion, LEAD facilitators become one of
the very handy access points for those frst-year students to connect to other second-year students who
just fnished their summer internships and are excited to meet frst-year students.” A third facilitator ex-
pressed similar thoughts in an April 2018 blog post: “Between the relationships I formed with my frst-year
students and the bonds I deepened with the second-year LEAD [facilitators] I worked closely with, I feel
that my connection to the Booth community was greatly benefted by being a LEAD [facilitator].”
LEAD is Chicago Booth’s only mandatory class; thereafter, students take courses of varying sizes with both
frst- and second-year students. Oftentimes, Chicago Booth’s full-time students will take classes with stu-
dents in the school’s Evening and Weekend MBA program at the downtown Gleacher Center. These elements
serve to broaden the community beyond the approximately 580 students with whom one will graduate.
Meanwhile, another graduate we interviewed explained, “It is easy to build strong relationships with
classmates, so long as you get involved. Whether it be through joining student groups, attending TNDC
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Year-Over-Year Class Class Class Class Class Class Class Class Class Class Profle Data: of of of of of of of of of Chicago Booth 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011
Number of NA NA NA NA NA 4,021 4,169 NA NA Applicants
Number of Full- 582 585 585 581 581 580 579 575 550 Time Students
Average GMAT 730 726.3 726 724 723 720 715 719 714
GMAT Range 620– NA NA NA NA 680– 660– 660– 660– 790 7601 7601 7601 7601
Average GPA 3.6 3.6 3.6 3.59 3.57 3.52 NA NA NA
GPA Range 2.72– 2.6– 3.2– 3.2– 3.1– 3.1– NA NA NA 4.0 4.0 3.91 3.91 3.91 3.91
Average Years of 5 5 4.6 4.6 5 5 5 5 5 Work Experience
Average Student 28 27.9 27.8 27.7 28 28 28 28 NA Age
Minority 27% 29% 23% 22% 24% 22% 9% 10% 9% Representation
Female 40% 42% 36% 36% 35% 35% 35% 35% 35% Representation
International 36% 39% 34% 36% 37% 32% 36% 34% 36% Representation
1 Median 80%.
[Thursday Night Drinking Club, a weekly social activity for the entire MBA student body], or just hanging
out in the Winter Garden, there are many ways to not just meet, but actually socialize with classmates.”
A frst-year student with whom we spoke attested that the culture among Chicago Booth’s students is
largely supportive, saying, “Most of the students are very willing to help each other despite the competi-
tive nature of the classes.”
A frst-year student observed in a 2013 post on her personal blog that the school’s breadth of social op-
portunities requires students to take on a more active role in engaging the community. “I will readily ad-
mit that although Booth has a very vibrant community, it is built differently than at other schools,” she
wrote, adding, “Booth is set up so that students aren’t interacting with the same people day in and day out.
Booth fosters breadth of socializing, but it’s up to the individual to determine where to seek depth. One of
the best consequences of this breadth is a greater sense of cohesion between the frst- and second-year
classes. This is the very opposite of the structure at most schools, where the depth of socializing is built
into the program and it’s up to students to seek out a wider breadth.”
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 3. Curriculum: Flexible Versus Mandatory Core
Many business schools have a “core” curriculum—a standard series of cours- Te rigidity or es that all students must take. However, these core requirements can vary fexibility of a school’s tremendously from one program to the next. For example, one school may frst-year curriculum teach its required curriculum for the entire frst year, meaning that students afects students’ will not take any elective courses until their second year, whereas another education and MBA program may stipulate only one or two required courses. socialization.
The rigidity or fexibility of a school’s required curriculum affects students’ education and socialization. Regardless of their pro- Average GMAT of Incoming Students (Class of 2019) fessional experience, students at a school with a rigid core cur- Chicago Booth 730 riculum must all take the same classes. At some schools, for ex- Columbia Business School 724 ample, even CPAs must take the required foundational accounting course, whereas at others, students can waive selected classes Cornell Johnson 700 if they can prove a certain level of profciency. Again, both ap- Dartmouth Tuck 722 proaches have pros and cons, and what those are depends on Duke Fuqua NA your perspective. Harvard Business School1 730 Michigan Ross 716
Proponents of a rigid core curriculum would argue that academics MIT Sloan 722 understand what skills students need to become true managers Northwestern Kellogg 732 and that when students “overspecialize” in one area, their over- NYU Stern 714 all business education can ultimately suffer. A signifcant body of Stanford GSB 737 academic writing has been devoted to critiquing programs that UC Berkeley Haas 725 give students a narrow view of business, notably Henry Mintz- UCLA Anderson 716 berg’s Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of UPenn Wharton 730 Managing and Management Development (Berrett-Koehler, 2004) UVA Darden 713 and Rakesh Khurana’s From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The So- Yale SOM1 730 cial Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unful- flled Promise of Management as a Profession (Princeton Univer- 1 Represents median rather than average. sity Press, 2007).
Advocates of the core curriculum approach would also argue that having all students take the same classes creates a common language and discussion among the classmates because of the shared experience. In addition, propo- nents contend that a rigid core curriculum facilitates learning, because students who have applicable direct experi- ence bring that knowledge and insight into the classroom and can thereby help teach others. Finally, schools with mandatory cores generally keep students together in their sections for several months, if not an entire academic year, and students who interact every day in this way ultimately forge strong bonds. This sustained contact and connection can create a deep sense of community among the students.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 In contrast, those who would ar- Can Waive/ Cannot Waive/ gue in favor of a more fexible cur- Test Out of Classes Test Out of Classes riculum feel that students beneft Chicago Booth Harvard Business School from the opportunity to specialize Cornell Johnson MIT Sloan Columbia Business School Stanford GSB immediately—that time is short, Dartmouth Tuck UVA Darden and students need power and Duke Fuqua Yale SOM Michigan Ross choice in preparing for their de- Northwestern Kellogg sired careers. So if, for example, NYU Stern UC Berkeley Haas a student intended to enter the UCLA Anderson world of fnance, an advocate of UPenn Wharton fexibility would argue that the student should be able to study fnance in depth throughout the MBA program, possibly even from day one, so as to gain as much experience as possible in this area—especially before interviewing for a summer internship. Fur- thermore, proponents for fexible curricula caution that experienced students could end up “wasting” hours taking courses in subjects in which they already have expertise. Finally, they would assert that a fexible schedule allows students the opportunity to meet a greater number and wider variety of their classmates.
The academic calendar at Chicago Booth is divided into three ten-week quarters (fall, winter, and spring),
and students take three to four courses per quarter, for a total of 21 classes (including LEAD) over 21
months. Although a great deal of fexibility does indeed exist within the Chicago Booth curriculum, stu-
dents do not enjoy a truly “open buffet.” Beyond LEAD, the school breaks its frst-year course selection
down into different categories, and students must choose from among the options within each category
to fulfll certain requirements. Although these course categories are required for all students, approved
substitutes may be taken in areas where students may have prior experience.
First, students must take three Foundation courses, one from each of the following three divisions: f-
nancial accounting, microeconomics, and statistics. Each of these divisions includes between four and six
course options from which students may choose.
Foundation (one course from each of the three categories):
Financial Accounting
Microeconomics
Statistics
Second, students must complete six Functions, Management, and Business Environment courses, which are
divided into seven subsections. The Functions subcategories include fnance, marketing, and operations;
Management includes decisions, people, and strategy; and Business Environment includes just one busi-
ness environment course. Each subsection offers between three and nine courses from which students may
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 choose. Thereafter, 11 elective options remain for students among the 21 total courses (including LEAD) they need to graduate. With faculty permission, students may waive the prerequisites for some courses.
Functions, Management, and Business Environment (six courses chosen from seven categories):
Functions
Finance
Marketing
Operations
Management
Decisions
People
Strategy
Business Environment
Although this fexibility has its advantages, it also requires students to make certain academic choices early on. One Chicago Booth second year told us, “I was lucky. I knew what I wanted to do after school and had a clear academic path in mind to meet my needs from day one, which is when I had to make my aca- demic choices. I felt that some who were unsure of their paths were at a disadvantage with such limited structure.” Another second-year student with whom we spoke said that she, too, felt fortunate to have a defned path. Still, she seized the opportunity to discuss her academic and career plans with second-year students via the Career Advisor program—a peer advisor program in which experienced and trained sec- ond years talk through career options and approaches with frst years—and felt that it was of such beneft that she became one herself in her second year.
In a 2011 Bloomberg Businessweek online chat, a second-year student noted, “Booth’s fexible curriculum enables each individual to tailor his or her individual experience. I think being able to customize your MBA is a differentiating feature of the program.” One recent graduate with whom we spoke credited the pro- gram’s fexibility with his ability to obtain a banking internship in a diffcult economy. He told mbaMission that he overloaded on quantitative and fnancial courses in his frst semester to allay recruiter concerns about his rather qualitative background and then planned to take marketing, operations, and strategy courses thereafter.
Further, the Graduate Business Council (student government) offers what is called The Mentor Program—a kind of frst year/second year buddy system—to help incoming students acclimate to life at Chicago Booth.
So, candidates who are attracted to the school but have concerns about whether they can manage the fexibility should know that they will have resources available to help them effectively navigate and shape their Chicago Booth experience.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 4. Pedagogy: Lecture Versus Case Method
Students will likely encounter multiple styles of learning while in business Students will school—including participating in simulations, listening to guest speakers, encounter many and partaking in hands-on projects—but the two most common MBA learn- diferent styles of ing styles are case method and lecture. learning during their time at business Pioneered by HBS, the case method, or case-based learning, requires stu- school, but the two dents to read the story (called a “case”) of either a hypothetical or a real most common are case protagonist who is facing a managerial dilemma. As the student reads, he/ method and lecture. she explores the protagonist’s dilemma and has access to various quantita- tive and qualitative data points meant to facilitate further analysis. (Cases can vary in length but are typically 10–20 pages long.) After reading and studying the entire case, the student generally understands the profundity of the problem and is typically asked a simple question: “What would you do?” In other words, how would the student act or react if he/she were in the protagonist’s place? What decision(s) would the student make?
Average GPA of Incoming Students After completing his/her independent analysis of the case, the (Class of 2019) student typically meets with the members of his/her study group Chicago Booth 3.6 or learning team (if the school in question assigns such teams) Columbia Business School 3.5 for further evaluation. Together, the group/team members ex-
Cornell Johnson 3.36 plore and critique one another’s ideas and help those students
Dartmouth Tuck 3.51 who may have had diffculty understanding particular aspects
Duke Fuqua NA of the issue or progressing as far on their own. Often, though
Harvard Business School 3.71 not always, the team will establish a consensus regarding the
Michigan Ross NA actions they would take in the protagonist’s place. Then, in class,
MIT Sloan 3.49 the professor acts as facilitator and manages a discussion of the
Northwestern Kellogg 3.6 case. Class discussions can often become quite lively, and the
NYU Stern 3.48 professor will guide students toward resolving the dilemma.
Stanford GSB1 3.74 Sometimes, the professor will ultimately reveal the protagonist’s
UC Berkeley Haas 3.71 decision and the subsequent results—or even bring the actual protagonist into the classroom to share and discuss the case’s UCLA Anderson NA progression and outcomes in person. UPenn Wharton 3.6
UVA Darden 3.5 In short, the case method focuses primarily on the analytical Yale SOM2 3.69 process and illustrates that the problems presented have no
1 U.S. schools, 4.0 scale only. clear-cut right or wrong responses. For a student to disagree
2 Median GPA listed.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 with the protagonist’s chosen path—even after it has proved to be successful—is not unusual. After all, another approach (or even inaction) may have produced an even better result.
Note that case-based learning is not specifc to one academic discipline. Cases are available in fnance, strategy, operations, accounting, marketing, and still other areas. Further, many cases are interdisciplinary, meaning that they address more than one area at a time, such as requiring students to think about how a fnancial decision might affect the operations of a manufacturing company or the ways in which a marketing decision might involve signifcant fnancial considerations. Importantly, students in case environments are often graded on their “con- tribution” to the class discussion (measured by the level of one’s participation in discussions and analysis, not on the frequency with which one offers “correct” answers), so the case method is not for those who are uncom- fortable speaking in class. However, it can be incredibly helpful for those who want or need to practice and build confdence speaking publicly.
Lecture is the method of learning that is familiar to most people—the professor stands in front of the class and explores a theory or event, facilitating discussion and emphasizing and explaining key learning points. Often, stu- dents have read chapters of a textbook beforehand and have come to class with a foundation in the specifc area to be examined that day. Although the case method gives students a context for a problem, those who favor lec- ture tend to believe that the case method is too situation specifc and therefore prefer a methodical exploration of theory that they feel can be broadly applied across situations. In lecture classes, the professor and his/her re- search or theory are technically paramount, though students still participate, challenge ideas, and debate issues.
Note that at some schools, professors may alternate between cases and lectures within a single semester of classes.
True to Chicago Booth’s reputation for fexibility, the school allows its professors to decide which method
of instruction they prefer on a class-by-class basis. Some professors use cases, others use lectures, and
still others use both, switching back and forth from course to course. Assessing the ratio of lectures to
case method classes is diffcult, because the choice of approach varies from professor to professor and
courses are constantly being revamped.
One recent graduate with whom we spoke noted the advantages of fexibility as it pertains to pedagogy.
He felt that he was able to specifcally target classes in which case-based learning would be more effective
and then engage in lecture courses when he wanted more of a theoretical grounding. And a recent alumna
we interviewed reported that she felt the variety of teaching methods used allowed for better accessibil-
ity of some the subjects covered. “I would say that it was a really good mix of classroom teaching and case
studies,” she said. “I thought it was really helpful to get lectures on certain topics and then to use a case
study as an application of them. I just thought, for me, it made a ton of sense to learn some of the theories
frst and then to do more applications of them, do real-world scenarios.”
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 A frst year with whom we spoke emphasized that no matter which teaching method is used from one
course to the next, the school’s curriculum overall is generally heavy on quantitative analysis, saying, “Be
ready to be challenged. Even the intro foundation classes at Booth are not easy by any means. Booth is
analytical and proud of it.”
5. Academic Specializations/Recruitment Focus: Resources and Employers
Schools’ brands and reputations develop over time and tend to endure, Do not merely accept even when the programs make efforts to change them. For example, many stereotypes but truly applicants still feel that Kellogg is only a marketing school and that Chi- consider the breadth cago Booth is only for people interested in fnance, even though both pro- and depth of resources grams boast strengths in many other areas. Indeed, this is the exact reason available at each mbaMission started producing these guides in 2008—we wanted applicants school. to see beyond these superfcial “market” perceptions. Make sure you are not merely accepting stereotypes but are truly considering the breadth and depth of resources available at each school.
We have dedicated the majority of this guide to exploring the principal professional specializations for which re- sources are available at this particular school, and we encourage you to fully consider whether the MBA program meets your personal academic needs by supplementing the information here with additional context from the school’s career services offce, by connecting with the heads of relevant clubs on campus, and perhaps even by reaching out to alumni in your target industry.
Top Industries: 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 Chicago Booth
Consulting 32.6% 27.5% 32.1% 27.9% 30.7% 30.3% 27.8% 24.0% 23.2% 23.1%
Financial 29.9% 36.0% 35.2% 36.4% 35.0% 43.2% 41.1% 45.0% 42.5% 52.1% Services
Technology 18.7% 16.7% 15.2% 13.5% 12.3% 9.0% 9.9% 7.5% 5.7% 6.4%
Consumer 5.3% 6.9% 5.0% 6.1% 2.1% 2.2% 5.7% 5.8% 6.9% NA Products
Health Care Products and 2.9% 3.3% 2.9% 2.2% 2.5% 2.4% 2.1% NA NA NA Services
Energy 0.8% 1.2% 2.1% 2.8% 1.1% 1.3% 2.5% 3.5% 5.4% NA
Although Chicago Booth’s reputation as a “fnance school” may be warranted—given that many of its
standout theorists have made names for themselves in this area and a large portion of the program’s
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 School Top Industry for 2017 Graduates % Entering the Industry
Chicago Booth Consulting 32.6%
Columbia Business School Financial Services 34.4%
Cornell Johnson Financial Services 33.0%
Dartmouth Tuck Consulting 33.0%
Duke Fuqua Consulting 33.0%
Harvard Business School Financial Services 31.0%
Michigan Ross Consulting 32.7%
MIT Sloan Consulting 32.1%
Northwestern Kellogg Consulting 32.9%
NYU Stern Financial Services 32.4%
Stanford GSB Finance 32.0%
UC Berkeley Haas Technology 36.9%
UCLA Anderson Technology 30.1%
UPenn Wharton Financial Services 32.7%
UVA Darden Consulting 34.0%
Yale SOM Consulting 35.9%
Most Common Pre-MBA Industry (Class of 2019)
Chicago Booth Consulting 21%
Columbia Business School Financial Services 29%
Cornell Johnson Financial Services 26%
Dartmouth Tuck Consulting 21%
Duke Fuqua Tied: Consulting, Financial Services 19%
Harvard Business School Consulting 16%
Michigan Ross Finance 19%
MIT Sloan Financial Services 21%
Northwestern Kellogg Consulting 27%
NYU Stern Financial Services 29%
Stanford GSB Investment Management/Private Equity/Venture Capital 21%
UC Berkeley Haas Consulting 25%
UCLA Anderson Finance 25%
UPenn Wharton Consulting 26%
UVA Darden NA NA
Yale SOM NA NA
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 students aspire to enter this feld—the school certainly offers more than a fnance education and has been making a concerted effort to broaden its reputation beyond this industry.
In fact, in an exclusive interview with mbaMission, Associate Dean of Student Recruitment and Admissions
Kurt Ahlm noted, “Our graduates are analytical problem solvers who can apply what they learn here to successful careers in any number of felds. Booth has strength in many areas beyond fnance, including entrepreneurship and marketing.” And in a January 2013 post on the Booth Insider blog, an associate di- rector of admissions addressed the myth that the school prefers applicants from fnance and consulting backgrounds, saying, “We value diversity in all its forms, including career industry. Many of our applicants come from fnance or consulting backgrounds; but many more have work experience in other industries, including military service, marketing, education, retail, and nonproft work, just to name a few.”
In a January 2012 Chicago Booth admissions chat geared specifcally to applicants interested in entrepre- neurship, a coach in career services noted, “There is so much support here for students who are interested in starting their own entrepreneurial venture. Between courses, the Polsky Center [for Entrepreneurship and Innovation], student clubs, conferences and meet-up groups, an active alumni network, and support from career coaches and peer advisors, the possibilities are strong. If you bring your passion, we provide the ways to channel it!” And in a November 2014 chat, a member of the admissions committee reassured an applicant, “As a student at Booth, you begin interacting with our Career Services team right away. At
Orientation you will participate in Industry Immersion, an event that will help you to target your recruiting strategy. From there it largely depends upon the industry you are recruiting for, but trust that you will fnd abundant support from our coaches and career advisors along the way.”
Indeed, Chicago Booth has received praise for being a better-rounded school than its noted reputation for quantitative analysis may imply, and a recent alumnus with whom we spoke reiterated this point, com- menting, “It is not just a quant school! Some of the best classes that I took were in the strategy and mar- keting realm.” Similarly, when asked why she chose Chicago Booth, a frst year we interviewed said she was attracted to the school’s “balance of quant and non-quant classes.” The Economist ranked Chicago Booth number one in 2015, 2014, and 2013 for “student assessment of career service” and “diversity of recruiters” and number one in 2014 for “open new career opportunities,” suggesting that the school’s graduates fnd employment in a wide range of industries.
Members of Chicago Booth’s Class of 2017 largely entered the consulting industry (32.6%), followed by f- nancial services (29.9%). Consulting was the largest standalone job function (36.3%) for which graduates were hired last year, and in aggregate, investment banking (14.7%), company fnance (6.5%), investment management and research (6.1%), private equity (4.7%), venture capital (2.4%), and several other less-rep- resented fnance functions (1.2% in total) accounted for a total of 35.6% of all 2017 Chicago Booth graduates.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 The following table lists the top employers of Chicago Booth MBAs in 2017 and presents these frms’ hiring
numbers for the past several classes as well.
Class of 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010
McKinsey & Company, Inc. 48 35 44 40 41 28 39 24
Amazon.com, Inc. 26 19 14 9 10 NL NL NL
The Boston Consulting Group 26 23 29 25 18 24 19 19
Bain & Company, Inc. 22 15 18 16 21 21 17 15
Accenture 13 13 5 13 7 10 7 4
Morgan Stanley 11 9 NL NL NL NL NL NL
Bank of America Merrill Lynch 9 11 12 8 NL 8 8 NL
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. 9 8 11 7 7 6 6 9
JPMorgan Chase & Co. 9 8 8 9 9 7 8 7
Adobe Systems Incorporated 8 NL NL NL NL NL NL NL
A.T. Kearney, Inc. 7 5 4 5 12 6 6 7
L.E.K. Consulting 7 NL NL NL NL NL NL NL
Citigroup Inc. 6 6 7 9 9 7 7 13
Deloitte Consulting 6 9 7 11 7 10 4 6
Evercore Partners Inc. 6 NL 4 NL NL NL NL NL
Google Inc. 6 12 5 7 7 4 4 NL
Microsoft Corporation 6 NL 5 NL NL NL NL NL
Barclays Capital 5 4 5 NL NL NL NL NL
Cargill, Inc. 5 NL NL NL NL NL NL NL
Credit Suisse 5 5 11 12 13 14 11 12
Ecolab, Inc. 5 NL NL NL NL NL NL NL
International Business Machines 5 NL NL NL NL NL NL NL Corp.
PwC Strategy& 5 10 12 9 NL NL NL NL
Tyson Foods Inc. 5 NL NL NL NL NL NL NL
Apple Inc. 4 5 8 6 7 NL NL 4
Nestle USA, Inc. 4 NL NL NL NL NL NL NL
PepsiCo, Inc. 4 6 NL NL NL NL NL NL
Chevron Corporation NL NL 4 NL NL NL NL NL
Cisco Systems, Inc. NL 5 NL NL NL NL NL NL
Cornerstone Research, Inc. NL 4 NL NL NL NL NL NL
Deutsche Bank AG NL 7 4 NL NL NL NL NL
DISH NL NL 4 NL NL NL NL NL
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Class of 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010
Ernst & Young LLP NL NL 4 NL NL NL NL NL
Fidelity NL 6 NL NL NL NL NL NL
Lazard Frères & Co. LLC NL 7 4 NL NL NL NL NL
Moelis & Company LLC NL NL 4 NL NL NL NL NL
PIMCO NL 4 NL NL NL NL NL NL
Samsung Group NL 4 NL NL NL NL NL NL
The Cambridge Group, Inc. NL NL 4 6 NL NL NL NL
The Kraft Heinz Company NL NL 4 NL NL NL NL NL
William Blair NL 5 NL NL NL NL NL NL
NL = Indicates the company was not included in the school’s list of employers hiring four or more graduates that year.
Chicago Booth offers 14 concentrations that allow students to “develop frameworks that enhance or com-
plement [their] experience and ft [their] career goals,” asserts the school’s website. Concentrations are
not required, but students typically fulfll one to three of the following options:
Accounting
Analytic Finance
Analytic Management
Econometrics and Statistics
Economics
Entrepreneurship
Finance
General Management
International Business
Managerial and Organizational Behavior
Marketing Analytics
Marketing Management
Operations Management
Strategic Management
6. Alumni Base: Opportunities to Engage
The size and depth of a school’s alumni base may be important to you as you seek to break into a specifc feld or region/country. Some MBA programs have had large classes for many years and can therefore boast sizeable alumni networks, whereas other schools may have pockets of strength in particular parts of the world or in cer- tain industries—or can claim a smaller but tighter-knit and more dedicated alumni network overall. For example,
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Dartmouth Tuck has a smaller absolute number of alumni than most top U.S. Some schools boast schools but has repeatedly been touted as having the highest rate of annual sizeable alumni alumni giving, thanks to its very dedicated graduates. networks, while others have pockets of Although acquiring detailed breakdowns of a school’s alumni base is some- strength in particular times diffcult, you may want to consider whether the school you are tar- regions or industries. geting has alumni clubs in your chosen professional area (i.e., some schools have industry-specifc alumni groups) or preferred post-MBA location. Fur- thermore, if you are determined to live in a particular city/country/region after graduating, then earning your MBA in or near that area, if possible, may be a good idea, so that you can more easily connect with local alumni while you are in school—particularly if you want to pursue a niche professional area and do not expect to participate in on- grounds recruiting. Of course, technological developments have greatly facilitated outreach, meaning that alumni are no longer a fight or long drive away, but are now just a phone call, email, text, or even Skype session away.
Chicago Booth has more than 55,000 alumni who stay connected to the school via approximately 90 alumni
clubs (31 in the United States, 40 international, and eight special interest). The school’s special interest
alumni clubs include the Chicago Booth Black Alumni Association, the Chicago Booth Energy Network, the
Chicago Booth Pakistan Club, the Chicago Private Equity Network, the Chicago Booth Real Estate Alumni
Group, the Chicago Booth Women’s Network, the Chicago Angels Network, and the University of Chicago
Women’s Business Group. Graduates have reportedly even started corporate networks at such companies
as Kraft, Motorola, William Blair, GE, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, and Northern Trust.
Chicago Booth also has a mix of roundtable programs, in which groups of alumni meet for events and speak-
ers—predominantly in Chicago, but also around the world—so they can stay connected. These are the fol-
lowing:
Big Data and Analytics Roundtable
Business Book Roundtable
Consulting Roundtable
Entrepreneurial Roundtable
European Private Equity and Entrepreneurship Roundtable
European Wealth Management Roundtable
Finance Roundtable
Healthcare and BioPharma Roundtable
Innovation Roundtable
International Roundtable
Marketing Roundtable
Sales Leaders’ Roundtable
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Alumni Base
Schools are listed in order from largest alumni base to smallest within each category.
NYU Stern, UPenn Wharton, Harvard Business School 75,000 to 100,000
Northwestern Kellogg, Chicago Booth 50,000 to 75,000
Michigan Ross, Columbia, UC Berkeley Haas 25,000 to 50,000 UCLA Anderson, Stanford GSB
MIT Sloan, Duke Fuqua 10,000 to 25,000 UVA Darden, Cornell Johnson
Tuck 10,000 Yale SOM or fewer
0 25,000 50,000 75,000 100,000
Note: Some schools include MBA program graduates only in their alumni total; other schools may also include alumni from their part-time, executive, doctoral, and/or other programs, so totals may not be directly comparable.
Indeed, the school offers a wide array of events and functions for alumni, both nationally and internation-
ally—in fact, too many to list here. To learn more, view the alumni events calendar online at www.chicago-
booth.edu/alumni/events. Potential students should be encouraged to learn that they will have a variety of
ways in which to stay connected with the school after they graduate and to network with their fellow alumni
around the world. For an up-to-date and interactive map of alumni locations, go to www.chicagobooth.edu/
alumni/community/clubs.
7. Facilities: Shaping the Academic/Social Experience
When contemplating an MBA program, do not overlook the school’s facili- If a school has not ties. Renovations, upgrades, and new construction are all regular occurrenc- updated its facilities in es on school campuses these days, as some programs increase their square recent years, perhaps footage while others unify disparate areas or refresh existing spaces. Some none were needed or schools boast on-campus housing or elite athletic facilities, others have es- the school has invested tablished new green spaces and meeting rooms, and still others have refur- in other aspects of its bished or added classrooms, theaters, libraries, and other such resources. program instead.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Keep in mind, though, that just because a school has not updated or added to its facilities in recent years, this does not mean that its offerings are outdated or subpar; the lack of updates may simply be because none have been needed or the school has invested in other aspects of its program instead. A campus visit is always the best way to evaluate frsthand what a school has to offer, but we nonetheless dedicate this space to a discussion of the facilities available at this particular program.
Designed by world-renowned architect Rafael Viñoly and completed in 2004 at a cost of $125M, the Charles
M. Harper Center houses Chicago Booth’s full-time MBA program. The business school’s location boasts a
number of architectural points of interest, standing near Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House and the Univer-
sity of Chicago’s imposing Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. The Harper Center’s Rothman Winter Garden—a
towering atrium with six-story, glass Gothic arches—is at the heart of the building and serves as a central
place where students can study, socialize, and hold club meetings. With over 400,000 square feet of space,
12 classrooms (on the downstairs “classroom level”), offces for the entire administration and faculty (on
the third, fourth, and ffth foors, known as the “faculty foors”), 31 group study rooms, a 3,500-square-foot
student lounge, and 150-person dining facilities, the Harper Center helps shape Chicago Booth’s commu-
nity and is part of the school’s identity.
MBA students have access to the University of Chicago’s extensive library system. Students may also take
advantage of the 150,000-square-foot Gerald Ratner Athletics Center, which includes ftness centers, gym-
nasia, and a swimming pool and is home base for the university’s basketball, volleyball, and wrestling
teams.
Finding a parking space can reportedly be diffcult at the Harper Center; indeed, the Chicago Booth website
recommends that students driving to campus allow 30–45 minutes for parking alone. Parking permits for
spaces on the University of Chicago campus start at approximately $100 per month.
8. Rankings and Reputation: Important Metrics or Arbitrary Measures?
MBA rankings should always be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism, Te various surveys given that they can fuctuate dramatically from year to year and from publi- should and will cation to publication. For example, if you had relied on the Financial Times’ provide some context rankings to choose the Yale School of Management as your business school for your decision, but in 2011 because of the program’s position at number seven, you probably resist the temptation to would have been disappointed to see the school then slide down to number choose a school based 12 just one year later before rebounding to number nine the following year. on rankings alone. Similarly, if you had selected UC Berkeley Haas in 2004, when it was number
17 in Bloomberg Businessweek’s ranking, you would have been delighted to see the program rise to number eight in 2010 before it slipped out of the top ten again to number 13 in 2012.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Can an MBA program—which is made up of so many moving parts—really change so much in just one or two years?
Furthermore, how can one reconcile that UVA Darden is in the tenth position (among U.S. programs) in The Econo- mist’s rankings but is listed at 17th by Bloomberg Businessweek and by the Financial Times? Or that Stanford GSB holds the ffth position in The Economist and Bloomberg Businessweek surveys, but is ranked frst by the Financial
Times? Or that Northwestern Kellogg is ranked number eight on the Financial Times and Bloomberg Businessweek lists but holds the number one slot in The Economist’s survey?
An MBA ranking that appears to be gaining in popularity, according to feedback we have received from candidates in recent years, is from Poets&Quants, which aggregates what it considers the top fve MBA surveys—Bloomberg
Businessweek, The Economist, the Financial Times, U.S. News & World Report, and Forbes—to create a composite ranking.
Of course, the various surveys should and likely will provide some context for your decision, but resist the temp- tation to choose a school based on rankings alone, because rankings may ultimately betray you—possibly even before you graduate.
One thing to keep in mind, particularly for international students, is that a school’s reputation domestically can be quite different from its reputation abroad. Years ago, mbaMission worked with an international candidate who was accepted into the MBA programs at Cornell Johnson and Dartmouth Tuck. When this individual shared the good news with his manager, his manager said, “I thought you would have gone to an Ivy League school like Princ- eton!” Of course, Dartmouth and Cornell are in fact Ivy League institutions, and Princeton does not even have an
MBA program—the manager’s reaction illustrates how possible misconceptions can arise. So, after considering an
MBA program’s strengths, you might factor in that some schools have greater brand power in certain parts of the world, especially if you plan to live and work abroad after you complete your studies.
We advise you to consider your MBA a long-term investment that will pay dividends throughout your life, and such an investment should be based on more than a one-time ranking. In fact, most MBAs who are fve to ten years out of school are not even aware of what their school is now ranked. Perhaps more importantly, if you were to ask one whether the school’s position in the rankings has any effect on his/her career, the response would certainly be an impassioned “No!”
Today, Chicago Booth is among the top fve domestically in all four of the four most prestigious MBA rank-
ings. In Bloomberg Businessweek’s 2017 MBA rankings—generally considered the preeminent such sur-
vey—the school held number four spot for the second year in a row, down two spots from 2015. In the
Financial Times’ 2018 survey, Chicago Booth rose one spot from the previous year to fourth in the United
States, and three spots to sixth internationally. The program stood at second place both domestically and
internationally in The Economist’s rankings for 2017, after fve consecutive years at number one. The pro-
gram was listed fourth in the 2017 Poets&Quants ranking of U.S.-based business schools, one spot lower
than in 2016.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 U.S. Ranking: 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 Chicago Booth
Poets&Quants NA NA 4 3 3 4 3 3 3 3 NA NA
U.S. News & 1 3 2 4 4 6 4 5 5 6 NA NA World Report
Bloomberg NA NA 4 4 2 3 [1] 1 [1] 1 [1] 1 Businessweek1
Financial Times NA 4 5 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 7 NA
The Economist NA NA 2 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 2 NA
1 Until 2015, Bloomberg Businessweek released rankings every two years (in November), so numbers in brackets represent carryover from the previous year’s ranking.
In the 2019 U.S. News & World Report survey, the school remained steadily among the top fve, shifting
from third in the country to a tied frst place (with Harvard Business School)—Chicago Booth’s frst time
at the very top of the U.S. News rankings. In addition, U.S. News ranked the school among the top 20 in the
country in the following specialty areas: executive MBA (1), fnance (2), part-time MBA (2), accounting (7,
tied with USC Marshall), marketing (8), management (14), international (15), and entrepreneurship (19, tied
with two other schools). The Princeton Review’s 2018 ranking of 267 MBA programs named Chicago Booth
number three for entrepreneurship, number six for fnance, and number nine for Toughest to Get Into.
Despite Chicago Booth’s impressive standing in the various rankings, it cannot claim to be the number one
school in terms of global prestige. Quite subjectively, mbaMission would state that HBS, the Stanford GSB,
and UPenn Wharton have stronger global profles, though one will have no trouble opening doors with the
Chicago Booth name on his/her resume.
Several students with whom we spoke expressed general satisfaction with the school’s placement in the
various rankings. “We are solid,” said a frst-year student we interviewed, while another declared that he
was understandably “proud” of Chicago Booth’s long reign in the number one position in the Bloomberg
Businessweek survey. “I think the rankings are certainly justifed,” remarked a frst year when we asked her
opinion of the program’s standings, adding, “Booth offers a world-class education and gives you access
to the best professors and most talented students and alumni.” And another frst year declared, “Booth is
ranked in the top consistently, so I am satisfed.”
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Poets&Quants (2017)
1 UPenn Wharton
2 Harvard Business School
3 Stanford GSB
4 Chicago Booth
5 Northwestern Kellogg
6 MIT Sloan
7 Dartmouth Tuck
8 Columbia Business School
9 UC Berkeley Haas
10 Yale SOM
11 Michigan Ross
12 Duke Fuqua
13 UVA Darden
14 Cornell Johnson
15 UCLA Anderson
16 NYU Stern
17 Carnegie Mellon Tepper
18 UT Austin McCombs
18 UNC-Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler
20 Emory Goizueta
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 U.S. News & World Report (2019) Bloomberg Businessweek (2017)
1 Harvard Business School 1 Harvard Business School
1 Chicago Booth 2 UPenn Wharton
3 UPenn Wharton 3 MIT Sloan
4 Stanford GSB 4 Chicago Booth
5 MIT Sloan 5 Stanford GSB
6 Northwestern Kellogg 6 Duke Fuqua
7 UC Berkeley Haas 7 Dartmouth Tuck
7 Michigan Ross 8 Northwestern Kellogg
9 Columbia Business School 9 Columbia Business School
10 Dartmouth Tuck 10 Rice Jones
11 Duke Fuqua 11 UC Berkeley Haas
11 Yale SOM 12 Michigan Ross
13 NYU Stern 13 Cornell Johnson
13 UVA Darden 14 Carnegie Mellon Tepper
15 Cornell Johnson 15 Washington Foster
16 UCLA Anderson 16 Yale SOM
17 Carnegie Mellon Tepper 17 UVA Darden
17 UT Austin McCombs 18 NYU Stern
19 UNC-Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler 19 UCLA Anderson
20 Emory Goizueta 20 UTA McCombs
20 USC Marshall
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Financial Times (2018)1,2 The Economist (2017)1,3
1 Stanford GSB 1 Northwestern Kellogg
2 UPenn Wharton 2 Chicago Booth
3 Harvard Business School 3 Harvard Business School
4 Chicago Booth 4 UPenn Wharton
5 Columbia Business School 5 Stanford GSB
6 MIT Sloan 6 UCLA Anderson
7 UC Berkeley Haas 7 UC Berkeley Haas
8 Northwestern Kellogg 8 Dartmouth Tuck
9 Yale SOM 9 Columbia Business School
10 Dartmouth Tuck 10 UVA Darden
11 Cornell Johnson 11 Yale SOM
12 Duke Fuqua 12 Michigan Ross
13 NYU Stern 13 Duke Fuqua
14 UCLA Anderson 14 NYU Stern
15 Michigan Ross 15 MIT Sloan
16 Georgetown McDonough 16 UF Hough
17 UVA Darden 17 IU Kelley
18 UNC-Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler 18 Vanderbilt Owen
19 Carnegie Mellon Tepper 19 UNC-Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler
20 UTA McCombs 20 Cornell Johnson
1 Reranks U.S. schools from international ranking.
2 The Financial Times ranks Chicago Booth 6 internationally.
3 The Economist ranks Chicago Booth 2 internationally.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Te University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Summary
In November 2008, as stock markets were falling in North America and academic institutions were growing in- creasingly concerned about shrinking endowments, the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business made a stunning announcement: alumnus David G. Booth (MBA ’71), co-founder of Dimensional Fund Advisors, had made a $300M donation to the school—the largest donation ever to a business school and one of the largest donations to any academic institution ever. The school did not receive $300M in cash, however, but became a partner in
Dimensional Fund Advisors, from which it will receive dividends. Not too surprisingly, the school subsequently announced that it had been renamed the Booth School of Business in honor of its patron.
The Booth gift is yet another link in a chain of success that the school has experienced over the past decade or so, starting with the hiring (in 2001) of Edward “Ted” Snyder as dean, though he has since left Chicago Booth (in
2010). Then, in 2004, the school opened a new, cutting-edge, $125M facility—the 400,000-square-foot Charles M.
Harper Center—which galvanized a community that had previously been housed in disparate, and some say dreary, quarters.
With all this momentum, Chicago Booth experienced a swift uptick in its rankings, consistently appearing at or near the top of all of the “prestige” lists. The school has a reputation for superior academic research, particularly in fnance and economics, with several of its academics having won Nobel Prizes in these felds. Indeed, many prospective candidates consider Chicago Booth a “fnance school,” which is understandable, particularly given that 35.6% of the program’s 2017 graduates (37.5% in 2016, 37.1% in 2015, and 41.2% in 2014) accepted positions with a fnance function (including company fnance, investment banking, venture capital, private equity, investment management/research, and “other” fnance).
However, even though the aggregate percentage of all the fnance-related functions was consistently higher than for any other function since at least 2007 (the earliest year for which we have employment data) to 2017 (when con- sulting took over as the most popular function overall), consulting has steadily been the most popular standalone job function among Chicago Booth graduates, with investment banking claiming the second-highest percentage as a standalone function. To illustrate, in 2017, 36.3% entered positions with a consulting function, compared with
14.7% investment banking; in 2016, these fgures were 29.3% and 15.1%, respectively (33.5% and 16.7% in 2015, and
30.1% and 15.2% in 2014). We believe this helps attest to the diversity of the school’s MBA program.
Indeed, Chicago Booth is more than “just” a fnance school and offers a wide range of experiential opportuni- ties—especially for those interested in consulting and entrepreneurship. And although Chicago Booth will never
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 be mistaken for Kellogg in terms of its offerings in marketing, we have learned that Chicago Booth does in fact have a surprisingly strong program in this feld—as well as in the nonproft sector.
If “fnance” is one buzzword for Chicago Booth, “fexibility” is another. The school is known to have a very fexible curriculum—its LEAD (Leadership Effectiveness and Development) Program is actually the only specifc course that is mandatory in the Chicago Booth program. Although students must meet certain requirements by taking courses chosen from among several foundations, functions, management, and business environment options, the school has no strictly defned mandatory core curriculum. Students told mbaMission that because the program is not rigid, they are able to focus on their professional ambitions as soon as they start the academic program and can avoid redundant or even potentially irrelevant classes.
We believe that today, Chicago Booth can certainly be said to be stronger than ever. Given the improvements at the school in recent years and the infusion of new energy from the change in command, we are confdent that Chi- cago Booth will remain an applicant favorite because of its remarkable faculty, well-regarded admissions offce, and strong facilities.
Te Dean
In July 2016, Sunil Kumar, who had served as the dean of Chicago Booth since 2011, announced his departure from the school in order to join John Hopkins University as the provost and senior vice president of academic affairs.
Kumar’s decision came as a surprise to many as he had been appointed to serve a second fve-year term as dean in 2015. The announcement set off a national search for the school’s new leader. The University of Chicago an- nounced in August 2016 that Douglas J. Skinner, who at the time was serving at Booth as the deputy dean of faculty and as an accounting professor, would step in as the interim dean later that month. Skinner originally joined the school in 2005 after a 16-year stint at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. “Doug’s appointment will help sustain the momentum that has been built to further establish Chicago Booth as one of the world’s pre- eminent business schools while the search for the next dean is conducted,” University President Robert J. Zimmer commented in the press release announcing Skinner’s appointment as interim dean.
The search for a new long-term dean came to an end in March 2017, when the university announced the appoint- ment of Madhav Rajan, who served as the senior associate dean for academic affairs at the Stanford Graduate
School of Business (GSB) from 2010 to 2016. “We sought the most outstanding candidate whose values, ambi- tion, and abilities fully comport with the distinctiveness of Chicago Booth as one of methodological rigor in its research and education, and through that commitment one of high impact on the world,” President Zimmer and university Provost Daniel Diermeier said in the announcement, continuing: “We are confdent that Madhav will be an outstanding leader for Chicago Booth in the coming years.” Rajav holds three academic degrees from Carnegie
Mellon University and one from the University of Madras in India. He joined the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1989 and worked as an associate professor and later a professor at the school before stepping
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 in as an area coordinator for accounting at the Stanford GSB in 2002. Rajan’s role as dean will not constitute his frst professional involvement with Booth—he served as a visiting professor at the school during the 2007–2008 academic year. In addition to his contributions in the classroom, Rajan has sat on the editorial board of numerous accounting journals, including The Accounting Review and the Review of Accounting Studies.
In the announcement for the appointment, Rajan expressed enthusiasm for his new role, which he stepped into in
July 2017: “The values I have in research and education are deeply valued at Chicago Booth. People come here to do rigorous, empirically based research and analysis, which provides the basis for a transformative student experi- ence and an extremely effective MBA curriculum. We have an exciting opportunity to take Booth’s deep strengths and leverage them here and around the world. I am thrilled to have the chance to be dean at what is unquestion- ably the greatest academic business school.”
In a May 2017 interview with Chicago Business, the offcial Chicago Booth newspaper, Rajan discussed his shift from one role to another within the school: “I think the big difference being the dean instead of a deputy dean is that the focus shifts from internal to external. I expect to spend perhaps 50% of my time being the face and voice of the school towards external audiences, primarily the alumni. That’s the big change and it’s particularly impor- tant now when the university is running an ongoing fundraising campaign, which has been a slightly disrupted by the transition [of deans]. Therefore, getting into this role will be a big priority from the beginning.” In the same interview, Rajan listed a number of goals for his new role, including increasing the percentage of joint-degree students within Booth to 25% of the student body. Rajan also expressed interest in featuring University of Chicago undergraduate students more in the Booth community. “Perhaps, we could offer [undergrads] the opportunity to take some Booth courses now, go away to work for two years and come back to fnish their MBA,” Rajan said.
Rajan’s predecessor Sunil Kumar took over as dean of Chicago Booth in 2011, replacing Edward “Ted” Snyder, who had served as the school’s dean since 2001. Before his appointment as dean and professor of operations man- agement at Chicago Booth, Kumar served on the faculty of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business for 14 years, where he was also senior associate dean for academic affairs. Kumar received a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a Master of Engineering in computer science and automation from the Indian Institute of Science, and a Bachelor of Engineering from Mangalore University. He has been the recipient of numerous honors for his teaching and research in the area of operations management and communications networks, including the 1998 Finmeccanica Faculty Scholarship from Stanford University and the
2001–2002 Professor of the Year award at the Indian School of Business.
Kumar stated in a 2010 Wall Street Journal article on his hiring that his primary goal was “to strengthen and en- hance what is already great,” while learning more “about the students, faculty and the programs.” In a 2014 inter- view with the Wall Street Journal, Kumar emphasized his desire to broaden prospective students’ perception of the school. “The most common one [thing people get wrong] is that it’s a fnance and banking school,” he said. “We support a broad array of careers. Entrepreneurship and fnance are tied for the school’s most popular concentra- tion. About 10% of our class will go into marketing, and a signifcant fraction will go into tech.” When asked why the
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Chicago Booth curriculum is such a fexible one, Kumar explained that most students have work experience when they enter the school. “We believe that when you’re 27 years old, you’ve worked for fve years in industry, and you have some reasonable expectation of where you want to go, you should have that choice,” he stated. “We want the student to decide at what level she will take courses; we want her to pace based on what is most comfortable or most challenging.”
Professional Specializations
Consulting
Although Chicago Booth has a reputation as a fnance school, it still places at least one-quarter of each graduating class in consulting positions. In 2017, 32.6% of Chicago Booth graduates took positions in the consulting industry.
Despite a slight dip from 2015 to 2016, this percentage had been increasing fairly steadily throughout recent years: from 27.8% in 2011 to 30.3% in 2012, 30.7% in 2013, 27.9% in 2014, 32.1% in 2015, and 27.5% in 2016. For the past de- cade, McKinsey & Company has been the top employer of Chicago Booth graduates—48 in 2017, 35 in 2016, 44 in
2015, 40 in 2014, 41 in 2013, 28 in 2012, 39 in 2011, 24 in 2010, 23 in 2009, 29 in 2008, and 33 in 2007. Other frms that hired a signifcant number of 2017 Chicago Booth graduates for consulting positions include Amazon.com, Inc. (26); the Boston Consulting Group (26); Bain & Company (22); Accenture (13); and Morgan Stanley (11). As a December 2012
Poets&Quants article states, the school has “become the preferred business school for the elite consulting frms.”
Chicago Booth offers no specifc consulting track, but the school provides considerable hands-on opportunities in this area to its MBA candidates, particularly through its “lab” courses. Via the “Lab in New Product and Strategy
Development,” for example, teams of MBA students take on consulting assignments and work with executives from major companies to target a problem that the client frm is encountering or to conduct research on a stra- tegic opportunity. The “New Venture and Small Enterprise Lab” and the “Private Equity/Venture Capital Lab” may seem to cater to niche groups, but in fact, they both represent opportunities for aspiring consultants to engage directly with senior management and make hands-on decisions with the assistance of teammates and mentors.
In addition, a variety of student clubs at Chicago Booth serve aspiring consultants, including the Management
Consulting Group, the Corporate Management and Strategy Group, and the Business Solutions Group. While the
Management Consulting Group and the Corporate Management and Strategy Group educate students on the ins and outs of obtaining a job in this feld—through resume preparation and reviews, case workshops, and Lunch and Learn sessions—the Business Solutions Group is unique in that it actively engages frst-year students in high- quality consulting projects.
In short, the Business Solutions Group (BSG) is not so much about preparing for a consulting job as it is about gaining actual consulting experience. Each fall, teams of fve frst-year students, along with a second-year mentor, work for a nine-week period at a broad range of both for-proft and nonproft frms, which have ranged from the
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 well-known international restaurant chain McDonald’s to the internationally renowned Art Institute of Chicago to a small nonproft such as Little Miss Giving’s (a bakery) to a start-up such as Advanced Diamond Technologies
(which applies diamond flm to products to make them durable), to help these organizations solve various market- ing, operational, and/or strategic problems.
Although the BSG managed 11 projects in 2007 and 14 in 2008, the group has reportedly maintained just eight to ten projects annually in recent years. In an interview with mbaMission, a BSG co-chair explained, “The decision to limit the number of projects at ten was a strategic choice. We have always had ample potential client interest in participating, but we’ve recently capped the number of projects in order to create a more competitive project selection process. This is also benefcial for the students, as it ensures that only the best projects are used for the group.” Recent projects have included conducting industry analysis for ArrowStream, developing a marketing strategy for Excelerate Labs, and performing internal research and analysis for Baxter Healthcare.
Finally, Chicago Booth’s one mandatory course, the LEAD Program, involves a series of events and activities that help MBA students better understand their personal communication and leadership styles. Throughout this 125- hour program, frst-year students take on team challenges (e.g., the outdoor experience, which involves ropes courses, climbing walls, and other physical challenges that incorporate a mental component), learn about their personality type (via the Myers-Briggs test), and receive one-on-one coaching (e.g., on communication styles and negotiation strategies) from faculty and second-year student mentors. This course is not designed exclusively for consultants, but its teachings are broadly applicable to the team-based, leadership-oriented positions that consulting typically entails.
Similarly, Chicago Booth’s annual Management Conference is not solely for aspiring consultants but serves also as a venue through which interested students can access cutting-edge research in the feld of general management and can network with more than 1,000 students, business community members, and alumni. The conference cel- ebrated its 66th year in April 2018 with the theme “Shaping the Theory and Practice of Business.” Keynote address- es were delivered by the executive chairman of the Chicago Cubs and the chairman and co-founder of InCapital; other frms represented at the event included Linden Capital Partners, Cargill, and Strategic Value Partners. Two sets of breakout panel sessions covered such topics as “The Amazon Effect: Strategies for Managing the Changing
Retail Landscape,” “Entrepreneurial Selling,” “Technological Change and the Decline in Work,” and “Accounting
Inconsistencies.” The event concluded with a networking reception.
The May 2017 event featured two sets of breakout sessions with panels on such topics as “Designing a Good Life,”
“Scalable Price Targeting,” “Building Your Leadership Capital,” and “Renegotiating NAFTA: Prospects and Sce- narios from a Mexican Perspective.” Firms represented at the event included The Prizker Group and Patria Inves- timentos Amgen, C.H. Robinson, Citadel, and Oak Hill Capital Partners—in fact, two co-managing partners of The
Pritzker Group and a managing partner of OceanM19 the CEO and founder of Citadel delivered the event’s keynote addresses. A networking reception concluded the day’s events.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 The 2016 Management Conference was held in May and also featured two sets of breakout sessions. Topics cov- ered included “What Does the Rise of Populism Mean for American Business?,” “Sluggishness in the US Labor Mar- ket,” “CEO Perspectives,” and “Big Value from Big Data with Marketing Analytics.” Amgen, C.H. Robinson, Citadel, and Oak Hill Capital Partners were among the frms represented at the event. The keynote address was delivered by the CEO and founder of Citadel. A networking reception concluded the event.
At the 2015 event, breakout sessions covered such issues as “Global Convergence in Corporate Governance Prac- tices,” “Innovation Inside the Corporation,” “Asset Management,” and “Mergers and Acquisitions Strategy.” Among the conference’s participants were representatives from Textura Corporation, Google, Newport Capital Group, and McKinsey & Company. Richard H. Thaler, Chicago Booth’s Charles A. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics delivered the keynote address, and attendees were invited take part in a networking reception.
Entrepreneurship, Private Equity, and Venture Capital
Chicago Booth and its Michael P. Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation provide a wealth of formal academic opportunities in the areas of entrepreneurship, private equity, and venture capital. In late 2012, the center received a $8M donation from Polsky—in addition to his 2002 $7M gift—which has allowed the school to hire new staff, add facility space, and expand opportunities to help meet the growing demand for entrepreneurial programming.
Students may choose from among approximately ten entrepreneurship and related courses, such as “Building the
New Venture,” “Entrepreneurship through Acquisition,” and “Entrepreneurial Selling.” The school’s experiential
“lab” programs, however, appear to constitute the real heart of its offerings in this area. For example, via the “New
Venture and Small Enterprise Lab,” students work hands-on in small groups with the senior management of a new venture to identify and realize strategic and operational goals. For up to ten hours a week for an entire quarter, students in this lab work in a variety of functions within a frm or take on a dedicated project in a class designed to train those who intend to ultimately join start-ups or consult to them. Participating enterprises in the Chicago area include InContext Solutions, MightyNest, Protein Bar, and Solixir.
In the “Private Equity/Venture Capital Lab,” students’ classroom experience is enhanced by guest lectures by leaders in the feld; simultaneously, students intern for a minimum of 15–20 hours each week for at least ten weeks with a private equity or venture capital frm, again working in a range of functions or on dedicated projects. Noting that the lab is as much about making contacts as it is about operational experience, a second-year student stated in a 2011 Chicago Booth online admissions chat that “knowing someone in the community, like through the PE Lab, helps open doors and tap into the PE/VC network. And getting that frst meeting is half the battle. It also makes internship and full-time conversations much richer with relationships you bring to the table.”
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Continuing the school’s experiential offerings, the Polsky Center sponsors the annual Edward L. Kaplan New Ven- ture Challenge (NVC), which bills itself as the number-one accelerator program in the country on its website.
During the fall, students form teams—each of which must include at least one University of Chicago graduate student but can also include part-time and executive MBA students—and these groups pitch their business ideas and submit their feasibility summaries by the following February. Then, approximately 30 teams advance to the second phase of the challenge, and the Chicago Booth students who have made it this far join the “Special Topics in Entrepreneurship” class, where they develop their ideas and have them critiqued by venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, with eight to ten ultimately advancing to the fnals in May. A second-year student described the
NVC in a 2011 Chicago Booth admissions chat as “one of the most thrilling experiences here at Chicago Booth.”
Finally, these fully developed ideas are presented to and judged by entrepreneurs and business leaders. Since
1996, the center has helped launch more than 185 companies that, in turn, have raised upwards of $600M in capital in spaces as diverse as payment solutions, fexible solar panels, food preparation, and children’s toys. The 2017
NVC, hosted in May, featured 11 fnalists teams—for the frst time in the competition’s history, more than ten teams were chosen for the fnal. AMOpportunities, a marketplace for medical trainees, won the $100,000 frst-place prize.
The second-place winner, electricity delivery developer Switched Source, received $80,000. Ezza, a modern mani- cure provider, came in third and won $75,000.
In May 2016, the NVC awarded more than one million dollars—more than double compared to the previous year—to students in the form of cash prizes and business services for their winning business plans. At frst place in 2016, winning $90,000, was compensation transparency platform TransparentC. Second place was claimed by Coronado
Conservation, which produces innovative toilets and took home $70,000. Search relevance solution Riviter came in third and received $45,000.
In 2015, healthy meal appliance Maestro won the frst-place prize of $70,000. Second place was tied with surgi- cal team management tool ExplORer Surgical, which claimed $50,000, and NETenergy, which provides storage for thermal energy and received a $40,000 prize. In 2014, RoomVa, a reservation system for small South American ho- tels, and Simple Mills, which provides nutrient-rich baking mixes, tied for frst place and each took home $30,000.
Competing NVC teams have also been able to take advantage of the ARCH Venture Partners New Business Incu- bator for one year (or until they receive funding to launch their businesses), beneftting from access to phones, computers, offce supplies, a conference room, and offce and faculty support. Successful ventures that have been launched through the competition include GrubHub, Braintree, Bump Technologies, BenchPrep, Base, Rise Inter- active, Swingbyte, and ZipFit.
In addition to the traditional NVC and two other iterations of the competition designated for undergraduates and students pursuing executive MBAs at one of the school’s international campuses, Chicago Booth students with an entrepreneurial bent who also have an interest in social entrepreneurship may compete in the John Edwardson
’72 Social New Venture Challenge (SNVC). The SNVC is co-organized by the Polsky Center and the Social Enterprise
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Initiative and invites participants to pitch both for-proft and nonproft business plans that focus on sustainability and social impact. If accepted into the competition, students are enrolled in the course “New Social Ventures” and given mentorship, resources, and the opportunity to present their venture plans to experts and business leaders in the feld.
The 2017 SNVC fnals featured seven teams. Provide, which offers an administrative back-offce software for child care providers in low-income areas, received the frst-place prize of $60,000. Flipside, a social media viewpoint platform, and JuryCheck, an application to prevent underrepresentation in jury pools, tied for the second-place prize and each received $20,000.
Seven teams competed in the 2016 SNVC fnals, and two teams tied for the frst place. AccessArc, a technology company that aids incarcerated individuals, and JoinGiving, which pairs businesses with nonprofts, both received
$20,000. No second-place prize was distributed, although two teams were chosen as third-place winners. Kitch- enet, which provides people living in food deserts with healthy meals, and Solar Bus 4 Schools, which aims to reduce school bus emissions, each went home with $5,000.
Of the seven teams selected to compete in the 2015 SNVC fnals, BallotReady, an online voters’ manual, placed frst, winning $30,000. The second-place winner, local goods provider Arev Armenia, received $20,000. In 2014, six teams competed. Hello Tractor, a tractor rental program in Nigeria, placed frst, winning $30,000. The second- place winner, Moxie Leadership Academy, a middle school–level summer program for low-income communities, received $20,000.
Meanwhile, in the Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC), students play the role of venture capitalists, evaluating business ideas and making investment recommendations to a panel of experienced, real-world inves- tors and entrepreneurs. The winning team at the school level goes on to compete in the regional competition and then—ideally—the international one, vying for the ultimate grand prize of $10,000 in funds, but more so for the prestige of the win and the opportunity to catch the attention of the venture capital judges. A Chicago Booth team won frst place in the regional competition during the inaugural VCIC in 2005. Since then, fve regional competi- tions have been won by Chicago Booth teams, and in both 2013 and 2012, a Chicago Booth team claimed the Entre- preneurs’ Choice Award at the regional level. In 2010, the Chicago Booth team took frst place at the international fnals for the frst time in history, and in 2015, the school’s team claimed third place at the international fnals.
Two teams from Booth won their respective regional competitions in 2016. One team came in second in the global fnals, while the other received the Entrepreneurs’ Choice Award.
We should note that entrepreneurially minded students can also apply for funding from the Hyde Park Angels
(HPA), a group of former Chicago Booth Executive MBA students who make investments in start-ups—the group has invested more than $566M to date. Although the HPA is an arms-length organization and does not source investments exclusively from Chicago Booth, it maintains a connection to the Polsky Center, which supports the
HPA’s mission. So, students hoping to get in front of the HPA’s investment committee will have a built-in network-
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 ing advantage. Further, the HPA offers students the opportunity to intern as associates and gain venture capital experience while pursuing their MBA at Chicago Booth. Tom Ancona, who was at the time the associate director of the HPA, told mbaMission that eight to ten students generally serve as HPA associates during the school year, while two serve over the summer.
At Chicago Booth, entrepreneurship involves more than just facilitating seed-stage companies—it also encom- passes small business. Via the Hamer Small Business Initiative—which was established through a $2.5M gift from alumnus Donald W. Hamer (’58)—the Polsky Center can “reach deep” into the small business sector, both theoreti- cally and practically (in the greater geographic region around the school), claims its website. An associate director at the Polsky Center explained to mbaMission that the Hamer Initiative supports such programs as the Digital
Marketing Strategies Workshop, which is held on a Saturday each February and invites expert speakers to share effective web conversion strategies. Past speakers have included a partner at OCA Ventures, the co-founder/CEO of Excelerate Labs, and the chief marketing offcer for Power2Switch.
The Hamer Initiative also created the Entrepreneurial Internship Program, which allows students to intern, be- tween their frst and second years, with small businesses that may otherwise be unable to pay the interning students a salary. Through the program, students who work at eligible companies (i.e., those with less than $50M in revenue and no more than 150 employees) receive fnancial support during the course of their internship. This support, which is made possible via sponsor donations, gives the students the opportunity to gain real-world experience in an entrepreneurial environment.
A resource specifcally for female students with an interest in entrepreneurship is the Herman Family Fellowship, offered through the Polsky Center. This fellowship, formed in 1995, was established to alleviate the burden of the expense of business school and thus help the student recipient pursue an entrepreneurial dream. Each year, one or two female students receive funding that covers her two-year MBA experience.
A total of 6.5% of the Class of 2017 entered the private equity (4.7%) and venture capital (1.8%) industries—com- pared with 6.3% (5.1% and 1.2%, respectively) in 2016 and 5.6% (4.8% and 0.8%, respectively) in 2015. Firms in this space that have recruited at Chicago Booth in recent years include Baird Capital Partners; Altamar Private Equity;
Cartesian Capital Group, LLC; Partners Group; Emerging Capital Partners; and Scale Venture Partners. Nineteen
2017 graduates—3.2% of the class—chose to start their own business after graduation (compared with 17 and 2.9% in 2016, 19 and 3.3% in 2015, and 20 and 3.3% in 2014) rather than accepting a full-time position with a recruiting company.
Finance
With names like Eugene Fama, Gary Becker, and (the late) Robert Fogel associated with the school, the word “f- nance” readily—and not surprisingly—comes to mind whenever Chicago Booth is mentioned. We should note that
Professor Fama, generally regarded as “the father of modern fnance,” served as inspiration for David Booth, who
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 learned about Fama’s philosophy on indexing (purchasing a broad number of stocks that are representative of the market at large, rather than picking a small number of potential winners) and formed Dimensional Fund Advisors as a manifestation of Fama’s theories. Now, years later, Chicago Booth is a $300M partner in the company.
Indeed, the school has a long history of economic and fnancial scholarship, thanks to its multiple Nobel Prize– winning and distinguished faculty in these felds. Chicago Booth has 42 professors dedicated to teaching nearly
40 fnance classes and had been consistently sending more than one-third of its graduates into careers in this industry each year until 2017 (29.9% in 2017, 36.0% in 2016, 35.2% in 2015, 36.4% in 2014, and 35.0% in 2013), even during the most recent economic downturn. To put this into perspective, Chicago Booth requires the completion of only 21 courses total to graduate. So, a student could not possibly exhaust his/her options within fnance while at the school—something committed fnance types may consider a shame. Courses in the fnance concentration include “Financial Markets and Institutions,” “Cases in Financial Management,” “Fixed Income Asset Pricing,” and
“Corporation Finance.”
As further testament to the interest in fnance on campus, Chicago Booth has several student groups that focus either fully or partially on the industry: the Investment Banking Group (IBG), the Entrepreneurship and Venture
Capital Group, the Private Equity Group, the Corporate Finance Group, the Credit Restructuring Distressed Invest- ing and Turnaround Group, the Hedge Fund Group, and the Investment Management Group.
The IBG, purportedly one of the largest student groups on campus, offers its members an extensive array of events and resources each year, including resume reviews and mock interview sessions, Lunch and Learn events to prepare students for recruiting, Bank Week (when students descend on New York City en masse to job shadow and network), and the IBG Conference.
“Bank Week is very much about getting to know potential colleagues and bonding with current classmates,” wrote a frst-year student in a January 2014 The Booth Experience blog post. “We got to see New York City from a unique perspective and had engaging conversations with really bright people.” Another frst year shared his experience in a January 2013 post, commenting, “The success of my time in New York confrmed that Booth was the best choice for me for business school. Bank Week was the perfect mix of structure and fexibility. Booth provides access to top frms in fnance through formal programming, but gives us enough room to customize the recruiting process to our own needs and goals. On top of that, I’m building a great network of colleagues and friends for the future.”
The IBG Conference takes place each fall and offers career panels and networking opportunities with industry leaders in banking, sales, and trading. A second-year co-chair of the IBG described the conference to mbaMission as “one of the capstone events provided to full-time students to continue learning about careers in investment banking, network with bankers, and attend functional workshops.” The event has attracted as many as 250 at- tendees in recent years, including students and banking professionals, and is, as a student who helped organize a past conference explained to us, “focused on providing students with frst-hand perspectives of the investment
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 banking industry as well as opportunities to directly interact with investment banking professionals of all levels, ranging from associates to vice presidents to managing directors.”
Panels at past conferences have explored such topics as “Successfully Navigating the Recruiting Process,” “Day in the Life of a VP or Associate,” and “Unique Perspectives from Industry Senior Experts.” Workshops have covered interview tips and an analysis of industry trends, and the conference’s sponsors have included Bank of America
Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, UBS, Citi, and Wells Fargo.
The Investment Management Group (IMG), another large campus organization, offers a stock pitch boot camp, mentorship, and pitch competitions, though its largest annual event is the Investment Management Conference— the most recent of which took place in November 2017. The conference welcomed representatives from such com- panies as Onyx Equity Management, T. Rowe Price, Omega Healthcare Investors, and Ariel Investments as speak- ers. The daylong event featured two discussion panels (“Emerging Markets” and “Asset Allocation”) in addition to two freside chats and a concluding cocktail reception.
We were unable to locate information about a 2016 event. The November 2015 event, however, attracted more than 200 participants and welcomed representatives from such companies as Dimensional Fund Advisors, PIMCO,
First Eagle Investment Management, and The Grosvenor Group as speakers. The daylong event featured two dis- cussion panels (“Developing a Sound Research Process” and “Identifying Market Opportunities”) and concluded with a cocktail reception. Speakers at the 2014 conference included the global credit chief investment offcer of
PIMCO and the head of marketing at Dimensional Fund Advisors. In addition to panel discussions focusing on such themes as “Value Investing” and “Women in Investment Management,” the daylong conference offered a speed networking session and a separate networking reception.
The Corporate Finance Group’s (CFG) mission, according to its website, is to provide members with “information on careers in fnance, assistance and advice in pursuit of such careers, and opportunities to meet professionals in the feld.” Members of this organization beneft from such offerings as interview preparation and resume re- view sessions. The group also hosts guest speakers, Lunch and Learns with company representatives, and social happy hours. Among the corporate fnance–related courses recommended by the club on its site are “Corporation
Finance,” “Financial Markets and Institutions,” and “Cases in Financial Management.”
The Corporate Finance Symposium is one of the CFG’s signature events, attracting dozens of students and repre- sentatives from such companies as Procter & Gamble, Exxon Mobil, Target, Prudential, Microsoft, and Citigroup.
The 2017 event carried the theme “Disruption” and featured keynote addresses by representatives from Ecolab,
Marsh & McLennan Companies, and Discover. Attendees were able to take part in two networking events. Although we were unable to locate details on the 2015 event, the 2016 symposium was themed “Challenges and Trends in
Corporate Finance for Global Firms” and in 2014, participants could dine with representatives from frms such as
Kraft Foods and M&T Bank, participate in networking sessions, and attend company presentations. “One of the key themes that came up was that the role of fnance at these companies is not a reporting role but a strategic
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 role,” said a second-year student of the 2012 symposium in a Chicago Business article, adding, “Attendees really enjoyed learning about the various opportunities within fnance at each of the companies. They also enjoyed hear- ing about some of the current projects the guest speakers are working on.”
Perhaps most important to some students interested in fnance is the opportunity to participate in the Student
Managed Investment Fund (SMIF), a portfolio controlled by second-year students and originally established in
2006 with a $1M allocation of the school’s endowment to provide “a real-world portfolio management environ- ment which allows students to improve their equity research and stock-picking abilities,” explains the fund’s website. First-year students can apply to become SMIF portfolio managers through the IMG. In the spring quarter, current SMIF portfolio managers choose the portfolio managers for the upcoming year based on the frst years’ involvement with the IMG throughout the year as well as the quality of their stock pitches.
What is unique about the SMIF is that 25% of its profts are placed into a scholarship fund each year and distrib- uted among rising second-year students. For example, in 2014–2015, the SMIF’s contributions of over $110,000 were a notable part of the $700,000 in student scholarships awarded for that academic year. The SMIF reports its year-to-year performance from time to time (available at www.chicagoboothsmif.com/holdings.htm), and as of
April 2018, the fund was valued at just under $1.6M.
The 29.9% of Chicago Booth’s 2017 graduates who entered the fnancial services industry (36.0% in 2016) did so at frms such as Bank of America Merrill Lynch; Credit Suisse; Fidelity Investments; Deutsche Bank AG; Goldman
Sachs Group Inc.; Citigroup, Inc.; JPMorgan Chase & Co.; and Morgan Stanley.
International Business
Chicago Booth’s international credentials seem quite strong: international students make up 36% of the Class of
2019 (34% of the Class of 2018 and the Class of 2017), approximately 25% of the faculty is international, and alumni can be found in nearly 110 different countries. Further, each April, the school offers an annual Worldwide Booth
Night, wherein prospective students, current students, and alumni gather in more than 100 cities around the world to network and socialize—no doubt an advantageous program for prospective MBAs, to say the least. And
Chicago Booth students beneft from more than a dozen different national/regional clubs at the school:
• Australia and New Zealand Business Group
• Belgian Business Students
• Canadian Business Group
• Chicago Africa Business Group
• Chicago Asia Pacifc Group
• European Business Group
• Greater China Club
• Hispanic American Business Students Association
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 • Japan Club
• Korean Business Group
• Latin American Business Group
• Middle East and North Africa Group
• South Asian Business Group
Chicago Booth offers students the opportunity to earn what is formally known as the International MBA Degree by taking at least fve courses in international business, pursuing an international exchange program for one semes- ter at one of the school’s 33 partner institutions in 20 countries, and achieving profciency in a second language.
Students can complete the course requirement by taking any fve of classes offered in international business/ macroeconomics. Sample courses in this area include “International Financial Policy,” “The Wealth of Nations,” and “Managing the Firm in the Global Economy.” Students may also complete international coursework offered by schools and departments within the broader university, including the Harris School of Public Policy, the Law
School, and the political science department.
The school offers exchange programs with the following partner institutions:
• Australian Graduate School of Management, Sydney, Australia
• Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
• ESADE Business School (Escuela Superior Administración y Dirección de Empresas), Barcelona, Spain
• ESSEC Business School Paris, Cergy, France
• Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), Escola de Administracão de Empresas de Sao Paulo, Brazil
• Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town, South Africa
• Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, Beijing, China
• HEC (Hautes Études Commerciales) School of Management, Jouy-en-Josas, France
• Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong
• IE Business School, Madrid, Spain
• IESE Business School, University of Navarra, Barcelona, Spain
• Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India
• Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, India
• ITAM (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México), Mexico City, Mexico
• Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
• Keio Business School, Keio University, Yokohama, Japan
• Leipzig Graduate School of Management, Germany
• London Business School, United Kingdom
• London School of Economics and Political Science: Interdisciplinary Institute of Management, United
Kingdom
• Louvain School of Management, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
• Manchester Business School, United Kingdom
• Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne, Australia
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 • Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• Pontifcal Catholic University of Chile, Santiago, Chile
• Recanati Graduate School of Business, Tel Aviv University, Israel
• Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Netherlands
• SDA Bocconi School of Management/Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Milan, Italy
• St. Gallen University, Switzerland
• Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden
• Vienna University of Economics and Business/Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, Vienna, Austria
• Warwick Business School, Coventry, United Kingdom
• Waseda Business School, The Graduate School of Commerce, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan
• Wits Business School, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
• Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea
The Initiative on Global Markets research institute is prominent on campus, offering the Myron Scholes Global
Markets Forum, through which it has hosted former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo and the CEO and president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago—not to mention Nobel Laureate Myron Scholes himself. The 2017 forum featured the U.S. managing editor of Financial Times, and in 2018, the forum welcomed the managing director of
Duquesne Capital Management.
In 2016, the forum welcomed a former chairman of the United Kingdom Financial Services Authority for a presenta- tion, in addition to professors from Booth, Harvard University, and the University of Chicago.
The spring 2015 forum featured the former governor of the Bank of England for a presentation titled “Money and
Nations,” as well as a senior fellow of foreign policy and global economy and development at the Brookings Insti- tute for a presentation on “China’s Economic Reform: Implications for China and for the World.” In 2014, presenta- tions included “The Only Game in Town? A New Constitution for Monetary (and Credit) Policy” and “Mindwise, How
We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel and Want.”
In addition, the multidisciplinary George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State (engaging the university’s law school and the Harris School of Public Policy) is devoted to interaction between private and public economies. The center’s predominant focus is research, and its publications could fll niches or perhaps be a bit esoteric for the casual student of international affairs.
Finally, candidates should note that Chicago Booth offers a program called Random Walks, through which stu- dents can take any one of more than 30 available trips to an international location (e.g., Chile, Iceland, Vietnam) as a preliminary orientation to the school—indeed, the school’s website describes the experience as “an opportunity to meet and bond with future classmates before the rigors of the MBA program begin.” Although this program is not part of the school’s offcial curriculum, it represents an opportunity for students to gain enhanced global
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 exposure. One frst year with whom we spoke described the Random Walks as “basically a kick starter to school social life.”
In 2017, 10.6% of graduates accepted positions outside the United States (down from 12.8% in 2016 and 17.3% in
2015). Recruiters of Chicago Booth MBAs in 2016–2017 include BNP Paribas, FALCONI Consultores de Resultado, Itaú
Uniblanco, Nan Fung Group, Rappi, Credit Suisse, Cencosud S.A., Baring Private Equity Asia, Bregal Unternehm- erkapital, and The Abraaj Group.
Marketing
Arthur Middlebrooks, executive director of the James M. Kilts Center for Marketing, told us at mbaMission that
Chicago Booth offers students “a full-service marketing curriculum” with roughly a dozen marketing electives and, true to its quant-heavy reputation, its 13-professor marketing department integrates marketing, economics, and statistics in its courses. Second-year students we interviewed informed us that “Data-Driven Marketing” is a
“quant-marketing” class popular among aspiring marketers and consultants. Other sample courses in this study area are “Marketing Research Lab” and “Pricing Strategies.”
Although Chicago Booth is not primarily known for marketing, by establishing the Kilts Center for Marketing— named for the 1974 alumnus who was formerly CEO of Gillette and Nabisco—in 1999, the school has attempted to bolster its reputation for excellence in the feld (possibly in hopes of gaining an edge over its crosstown rival, Kel- logg). More recently, Kilts donated $1M, via a challenge grant, to the school to attract and fund top students inter- ested in marketing. As a result, Chicago Booth provides approximately six students from each class with fnancial support, as well as mentorship from a senior marketing executive. A frst-year student expressed to mbaMission that the school offers robust networking and recruiting resources to students interested in marketing, adding,
“Chicago Booth is known as a sort of rigorous, analytic school, but the amount of support provided for ‘softer’ kinds of learning really surprised me.”
Early in the academic year, the Kilts Center sponsors the Quantitative Marketing and Economics (QME) Conference, which helps facilitate and encourage interaction among researchers in the feld. The conference’s goal is “to pro- vide a forum for interaction among researchers in this growing and important area,” states the center’s website.
The October 2017 conference, as in 2016, featured ten sessions over the course of two days, with topics includ- ing “Higher Minimum Quality Standards and Redistributive Effects on Consumer Welfare,” “Consumer Mistakes and Advertising: The Case of Mortgage Refnancing,” and “Dynamic Effects of Prize Promotions: Field Evidence,
Consumer Search, and Supply-Side Implications.” The 2017 Dick Wittink prize for the best QME paper, which is announced each year at the conference, was awarded in a tie to papers titled “Costly Search and Consideration
Sets in Storable Goods Markets” and “Identifcation and Semiparametric Estimation of a Finite Horizon Dynamic
Discrete Choice Model with a Terminating Action.”
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 The October 2016 event spanned two days and included ten sessions, covering such topics as “The Value of Us- age-Based Insurance Beyond Better Targeting: Better Driving,” “You Get What You Give: Theory and Evidence of
Reciprocity in the Sharing Economy,” and “Strategic Ability and Productive Effciency in Electricity Markets.” The
2016 winner of the Dick Wittink prize for the best QME paper was “Effect of Temporal Spacing Between Advertising
Exposures: Evidence from Online Field Experiments” by Navdeep S. Sahni, an associate professor of marketing at
Stanford Graduate School of Business.
In October 2015, the QME Conference offered sessions on topics ranging from “Signaling in Online Credit Mar- kets” and “Estimating the Heterogeneous Welfare Effects of Choice Architecture: An Application to the Medicare
Prescription Drug Insurance Market” to “Income and Wealth Effects on Private Label Demand: Evidence From the
Great Recession” and “Competition and Crowd-Out for Brand Keywords in Sponsored Search.” The 2015 Dick Wit- tink prize went to a paper titled “Online Ads and Offine Sales: Measuring the Effect of Retail Advertising via a
Controlled Experiment on Yahoo!” by economic research scientist Randall A. Lewis and scientist David H. Reiley.
A memorial event was also held for Associate Professor of Operations Management Che-Lin Su, who passed away in July 2015.
The October 2014 QME Conference included session topics on “Optimal Selling Strategies When Buyers Name Their
Own Prices,” “Signaling Value Through Assortment,” and “Dynamic Models with Unobserved State Variables and
Heterogeneity: Time Inconsistency in Drug Compliance,” as well as a breakfast and a dinner reception. The 2014
Dick Wittink prizewinner was Stanford Graduate School of Business Assistant Professor Stephan Seiler for his pa- per, “The Impact of Search Costs on Consumer Behavior: A Dynamic Approach.”
The Chicago Booth Marketing Group typically hosts an annual, half-day Marketing Conference covering topics that are less esoteric than those examined in the QME Conference and providing the requisite networking opportuni- ties with corporations. The 2015 event—the most recent about which we could locate details—carried the theme
“A Changing World: What’s Now, What’s Next?” and featured executives from the William Wrigley Jr. Company and
Workiva Inc. as keynote speakers. The day’s two panel discussions concentrated on the topics of “Pushing Bound- aries Through Innovation” and “Staying Connected to a Changing Consumer.”
Various informal Marketing Group–sponsored opportunities exist for students to interact with company represen- tatives on campus, including corporate presentations and interviewing practice sessions. Kraft, Microsoft, Wrig- ley, General Mills, Deloitte, Campbell’s Soup, and BCG have all presented for club members in the past. A frst-year student with whom we spoke reported, “Every single week, there’s a different company on campus, especially in the fall. The [presentations] are great because you get a more informal interaction; you’re not wearing your suit and name tag.” The student also mentioned an event at which approximately 30 frst-year club members held a
“product tasting,” buying various food and beverage brands for the sake of comparison.
Further, the school offers “day at” opportunities, wherein students visit various marketing frms in the greater
Chicago area to learn frsthand about those companies’ career offerings and corporate culture. Participating “day
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 at” companies in recent years have included Abbot, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, Wrigley, and Kraft. Of these off- site opportunities, a frst year told us, “You get a lot better sense of what the companies are like, even more than when they visit campus.”
As soon as December exams are done, interested students partake in Brand Week Trek, a networking blitz during which they visit frms in New York and on the West Coast. Firms visited in recent years include American Express,
Kantar, Pfzer, Johnnie Walker, and Campbell’s Soup. According to a frst year with whom we spoke, a West Coast
Marketing Trek was offered for the frst time in 2013, targeting frms in the areas of retail, consumer packaged goods, pharmaceuticals, and technology. And a frst-year club member told mbaMission, “There are fewer Mar- keting Group treks because the company presentations tend to be a lot longer and more in-depth.” In addition, according to another frst-year member, the group sponsors a Retail Trek (coordinated with the Retail, Apparel, and Luxury Group), which runs concurrent to the Brand Week Trek. On the Retail Trek, students have visited such companies as Coach, Cynthia Rowley, Rue La La, and Urban Outftters.
The school’s website lists two management labs dedicated to the marketing function, with frms such as Abbott,
Barclays, Campbell’s Soup, and Honeywell International, Inc. sponsoring these lab classes, for which students take on semester-long consulting projects. Arthur Middlebrooks, executive director of the James M. Kilts Center, explained to mbaMission that each management lab consists of eight to ten students with one or two coaches per team who meet three days a week. The class involves no curricular component: the class is the consulting project.
Said Middlebrooks of the lab course, “You learn a ton about the subject and a lot about your own work style.”
In addition, professors in Chicago Booth’s marketing department realized opportunities for increased practical involvement and created “hybrid” classes in “Marketing Research” and “New Product Development” that involve a lecture component but that also allow students to work on shorter-term projects with a more narrow scope for frms large and small. More than 200 students participate in these courses each year and work in teams of fve with such companies as GE Healthcare, Procter & Gamble, and Chicago Public Radio. Plus, in 2009, Chicago Booth started the Kilts Mentoring Program, wherein students interested in marketing are paired with one of approxi- mately 40 Chicago Booth alumni mentors from leading marketing frms (e.g., General Mills, PepsiCo) who provide their assigned students with career guidance and support.
Chicago Booth continues to expand its experiential learning opportunities through its partnership with The
Nielsen Company, a global market researcher. Chicago Booth houses Consumer Panel, Ad Intel, and Retail Scan- ner store data for Nielsen. Middlebrooks told mbaMission that through classes such as “Data Driven Marketing,” faculty teach students how to use this kind of data in their decision making. For example, the Consumer Panel data provide a record of what people buy in 60,000 homes, and through these records, students are able to “infer shopping behavior and track spending,” explained Middlebrooks. Students can access the data only through Chi- cago Booth courses and with faculty supervision. According to Middlebrooks, this partnership is meant to create
“a clearinghouse for data for the academic community.”
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Of Chicago Booth’s 2017 graduates, 6.9% accepted positions with a marketing function (7.9% in 2016 and 2015) at such companies as Amazon.com, Inc.; Anheuser-Busch InBev; Pepsico, Inc.; Samsung Group; Apple Inc.; and the
Kraft Heinz Company.
Nonproft/Social Entrepreneurship
No major is dedicated specifcally to nonproft work or social entrepreneurship at Chicago Booth. However, be- cause of the MBA program’s fexible curriculum, students can defne their own major in the area and might thus consider a variety of courses in corporate governance, public policy, and social enterprise. Because students may take up to six classes in other departments within the University of Chicago, they can take advantage of the exten- sive academic offerings available via the Harris School for Public Policy.
In 2013, Chicago Booth received a $5M gift from alumnus John Edwardson (’72), the former chairman and CEO of
CDW, to support the school’s Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation (formerly the Social Enterprise Initia- tive). This initiative “[equips the] community with the knowledge and tools to positively impact humanity,” states the school’s website. The center sponsored several distinguished speakers in 2017–2018 related to social entrepre- neurship, including the CEO of Operation ASHA and the CEO of Allen Edmonds Corporation.
Among the speakers in 2016–2017 were a consultant at the Bridgespan Group, the president and CEO of Honest
Tea, and the authors of The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty (Princeton
University Press, 2017).
Speakers in 2015–2016 included the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, the director of education and community engagement at Chicago’s Goodman Theater, and an executive chair of TeacherMatch. In 2014–2015, the initiative welcomed such presenters as the vice president of green innovation at NASCAR, the CEO of OneGoal, and the dep- uty commissioner of youth services for the City of Chicago The previous year, the initiative brought to the school the executive director of the Offce of Strategy Management and Chicago Public Schools and the senior director of sustainability for Keurig Green Mountain.
In addition, Net Impact offers students a signifcant experiential/leadership opportunity—its Board Fellows pro- gram, in which students join the boards of nonprofts as nonvoting members and complete a strategic project with the guidance of a board member who acts as a mentor. Students make a signifcant commitment to the nonproft with which they align—projects often demand eight to ten hours per week for six months.
Although the Giving Something Back Group (known as the GSB) is less managerial than the Board Fellows program, students interested in the nonproft world may be interested to learn that it facilitates a wide variety of commu- nity volunteer opportunities. Currently, the GSB offers more than 20 project options. For example, students may commit to tutoring disadvantaged children, assisting families with tax preparation, or preparing food for families staying at the Ronald McDonald House. mbaMission learned that this program, which has more than 200 members,
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 is quite popular among Chicago Booth students, and participants enjoy not only “giving back” but also bonding with their classmates through these volunteer opportunities. A frst-year GSB member told mbaMission that a goal of the group is “to reinforce the importance of volunteerism among business school students in an enjoyable and rewarding fashion,” adding, ”We hope that our efforts will promote long-term commitments and sensitivity to the importance of good citizenship.”
In addition, students can make an impact in the developing world through the International Development Group
(formerly the Chicago Global Citizens Group), which harnesses MBA students’ skills to beneft those in need in- ternationally. In recent years, Chicago Booth students have worked on consulting projects for the Inter-American
Development Bank, the New York University/Gates Foundation Microfnance Project, and the Clinton Foundation
HIV/AIDS Access Initiative, among other high-profle, international developmental projects. Further, the group sponsors a Spring Trek to a developing country—past trips have been to Kenya (2007), Tanzania (2008), Botswana
(2009), the Philippines (2010), Columbia (2011), Vietnam (2012), Nepal (2013), the Dominican Republic (2014), and
Peru (2015)—where students spend one week volunteering, meeting with local nonprofts and nongovernmental organizations, and sightseeing.
On the 2013 Spring Trek, for example, 16 students traveled to Nepal and volunteered to work with the Kevin Rohan
Memorial Eco Foundation, which was created in 2008 to “bring sustainable practices to the local communities by establishing programs that are deeply rooted and are serving the needs of the community,” explains the group’s site. The students witnessed frsthand how the organization’s programs have introduced basic social services to
Nepalese villages and even visited a leprosy treatment center. During the 2012 Spring Trek, 12 students worked on two projects in Vietnam: teaching English to the White Thai (one of more than 80 minority groups in the country) and assisting a local entrepreneur who employs disabled women in her handcraft business. A second year who participated in the 2012 trip told mbaMission, “We talked to some of the people that are investing in the country, among private equity funds and institutions like World Bank. In one week, we covered the more developed south with super lively Saigon, and the more traditional north, where we visited the capital Hanoi and surroundings.”
Students concerned with environmental issues will likely be interested in the Energy Policy Institute at the Univer- sity of Chicago (formerly known as the Chicago Energy Initiative), a research center devoted to studying the eco- nomic, environmental, and geopolitical impacts of energy use. Although students do not typically deal with cli- mate change “hands on” through the initiative, they have many opportunities to address energy use in academic forums through the speakers and workshops the initiative regularly hosts. For example, in 2017, a former assistant administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Offce of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance discussed “The Future of Regulatory Enforcement: Action from Data” and a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berke- ley National Laboratory gave a presentation titled “Expert Judgments on Future Wind Energy Costs: How Low Can
Costs Go?” In 2016, the chief economist and manager of business and market analysis for ConocoPhillips discussed
“U.S. Shale Renaissance: Implications and Challenges” and the director of the program on Sustainable Mobility at the Earth Institute presented the topic “Transforming Mobility and Logistics.”
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 The previous year (2015), the technology manager for natural gas technology programs at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory spoke on the theme “Energy and Environmental Implications of Gas Hydrates,” while a Harvard Kennedy School professor presented on the topic of “Solar Geoengineering:
Technology and Implications for Public Policy.” And in 2014, the CEO of Alliant Energy presented on the topic of
“Generating Results in an Environmentally Conscious World,” and a senior scientist for the Union of Concerned
Scientists addressed the topic “Renaissance Lost? The Future of Nuclear Power.”
Organizations such as the Barack Obama Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Charter School
Growth Fund, the Lemann Foundation, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and Education Pioneers recruited
Chicago Booth students in 2016–2017. According to the school’s most recent employment report, seven members of the Class of 2017 (1.4%; down from eight and 1.6%, respectively, in 2016, and 19 and 3.3% in 2015) entered full- time positions in education/government/nonproft.
Notable Professors and Unsung Heroes
Sanjay Dhar (www.chicagobooth.edu/faculty/directory/d/sanjay-k-dhar): If one were to say that a star marketing professor could be found in the city of Chicago, one would likely guess that that person would be found at North- western Kellogg. However, Chicago Booth has worked hard to develop its marketing program, and the school can claim the professor who wrote what the Journal of Marketing Research deemed its best article of 2008 and who has received several other awards and citations, including being recognized as an outstanding faculty member in three Bloomberg Businessweek guides to the best business schools. In 2017, Dhar received the Faculty Excellence
Teaching Award, which is voted on by evening and weekend MBA students, and in 2012, Dhar was honored by his executive education students with the Hillel J. Einhorn Excellence in Teaching Award. In addition, students told mbaMission that they are pleased that Dhar is teaching more and researching less. He keeps the energy high in his classroom by constantly walking up and down the aisles during discussions and then literally running to the board to write down salient points.
Nicholas Epley (www.chicagobooth.edu/faculty/directory/e/nicholas-epley): As a result of bringing social science to bear on management practices, Nicholas Epley has received such noteworthy recognitions as the 2011 American
Psychological Association Distinguished Scientifc Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology. In 2014,
Poets&Quants named Epley one of “The 40 Most Outstanding B-School Profs Under 40 in the World.” “Most people are intuitive psychologists in their daily lives,” he explains on the school’s website, “wondering why people think or behave as they do. I just happened to fnd a profession that enables me to answer these questions for a liv- ing.” Epley’s work has been featured in top media outlets and published in leading social and behavioral sciences journals, and in 2014, he published the book Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want (Deckle Edge, 2014).
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 An alumna we interviewed called Epley one of her favorite professors and praised him for his approach to teaching behavioral analysis, saying it familiarizes students with “the psychology behind making decisions and also what people’s biases are, how that works.” She added, “He’s done a ton of research behind that, and it was great to get that soft learning behind decision making and work with other teams and other people, just because it’s obviously something that you’re going to be doing in the real world.”
Eugene F. Fama (www.chicagobooth.edu/faculty/directory/f/eugene-f-fama): Among the most distinguished mem- bers of Chicago Booth’s faculty is Eugene Fama, widely recognized as the “father of modern fnance.” For his re- search on asset pricing and market effciency, he received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economic Science jointly with
Lars Peter Hansen (University of Chicago) and Robert Shiller (Yale University). Fama is reportedly one of the most cited researchers in the country, having published more than 100 articles and claimed a number of other presti- gious awards in the feld, including the 2007 Fred Arditti Innovation Award from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s
Center for Innovation, the 2007 Award for Excellence in Finance from the Morgan Stanley American Finance Asso- ciation, and the 2005 Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics.
The Nobel Laureate also serves as chair of Chicago Booth’s Center for Research in Security Prices. Although he does not regularly teach MBA courses, Fama’s notoriously challenging PhD course “Theory of Financial Decisions
I” is open to MBA students who are willing to take on the extra workload. As the course description states, “the expectation is that the average student spends 15+ hours per week on the course, outside of class.”
Scott Meadow (www.chicagobooth.edu/faculty/directory/m/scott-f-meadow): In both 2003 and 2005, Scott Mead- ow was featured as one of the most outstanding professors of entrepreneurship in the United States in Business-
Week’s (now Bloomberg Businessweek) “Guide to the Best Business Schools.” He is widely recognized as an expert in private equity investment and has served since 2000 as clinical professor of entrepreneurship at Chicago Booth.
As a testament to his decades of experience, Meadow was honored with the 2011 Richard J. Daley Award by the Il- linois Venture Capital Association for his contributions to the industry.
Meadow has taught more than 8,000 students, claims the school’s site, and received several recognitions for his teaching, including the 2010 Faculty Excellence Award. An alumna we interviewed identifed Meadow as one of her favorite professors. “I thought that was a really great class,” she said of his “Commercializing Innovation” course, adding, “Basically, the class is like a week-long due diligence session for different companies. … Professor
Meadow’s worked in venture, worked in PE, has all of that real-world experience. So I was really able to apply what his methodology is to a lot of different companies in a lot of different areas.”
Arthur Middlebrooks (www.chicagobooth.edu/faculty/directory/m/arthur-middlebrooks): A 1988 Chicago Booth alumnus, Arthur Middlebrooks is also executive director of the Kilts Center for Marketing and a management con- sultant who has helped notable companies—including the Bank of America, IBM Consulting, and BP/Amoco—intro- duce novel services and products. With these experiences in hand, Middlebrooks is prepared to take students in his “Lab in Developing New Products and Services” class through the entire product development process, start-
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 ing from scratch. In his class, rather than being instructed to dream up a product, students are given raw data and hold focus groups as they strive to identify a consumer need. Recently, students in this course conceptualized new bag products for Ziploc and presented their fndings to a panel of entrepreneurs. Students with whom mbaMis- sion spoke described Middlebrooks as innovative and gushed about his passion and energy. Plus, several were impressed that he knew each student’s name on day one of class.
Kevin Murphy (www.chicagobooth.edu/faculty/directory/m/kevin-m-murphy): In 2005, Kevin Murphy, who has a joint appointment in the department of economics at the University of Chicago, where he teaches PhD-level courses, became the frst business school professor to win the MacArthur Genius Grant, which he received for his groundbreaking economic research. Murphy’s course “Advanced Microeconomic Analysis” is affectionately called
“Turbo Micro” because of its enormous workload. One recent graduate told mbaMission that a typical Chicago
Booth class is supposed to be complemented by fve hours of homework per week but that Murphy’s course de- mands roughly 20 hours of work per week outside class. So why would students clamber to take the course? The alumnus with whom we spoke raved that it was taught at the PhD level and that Murphy is deserving of his “ge- nius” title, pushing students to think about their opinions in profoundly different ways. A frst year we interviewed identifed Murphy’s course as the most impressive he had taken thus far, saying it offered “a very complicated but logical way to view the world.”
Lubos Pastor (www.chicagobooth.edu/faculty/directory/p/lubos-pastor): Still relatively young, Lubos Pastor has already received considerable recognition for his research on the stock market and asset management and was featured among “The Best 40 B-School Profs Under the Age of 40” by Poets&Quants in 2011. Pastor’s work has been infuential, earning him such high-profle accolades as the NASDAQ Award, the Goldman Sachs Asset Man- agement Prize, and the Barclay’s Global Investors Prize, as well as Chicago Booth’s own Faculty Excellence Award for MBA Teaching in both 2009 and 2010. One student quoted in the Poets&Quants article said, “his witty style elevates classroom conversations and facilitates retention of core concepts.”
James E. Schrager (www.chicagobooth.edu/faculty/directory/s/james-e-schrager): Although he has a PhD from the University of Chicago in organizational behavior and policy, James E. Schrager is not just an academic but also a practitioner, able to claim that he helped take the frst private American company public on the Tokyo stock exchange and assisted in turning around aspects of the Pritzker family holdings, which were ultimately sold to
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. Students we interviewed noted that Schrager brings his high-level experi- ences to class but remains entirely in touch with students’ more modest perspectives, adapting his anecdotes accordingly and creating practical learning points that pertain to what students will face early in their post-MBA careers. Schrager is also a three-time recipient of the university’s Emory Williams Award for Excellence in Teaching
(in 2007, 2001, and 1996), and received the Faculty Excellence Teaching Award in 2017. One second-year student told mbaMission, “He is not up in the sky, but very practical, and by the way, his class is always full.” Students’ grades in Schrager’s “New Venture Strategy” class are based in part on the success of a business idea the students pres- ent to their peers—the other students act as venture capitalists and give feedback on the idea.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Luigi Zingales (www.chicagobooth.edu/faculty/directory/z/luigi-zingales): Luigi Zingales is known on the Chicago
Booth campus for his charm, sense of humor, and humility, but students with whom mbaMission spoke also call him an innovator, citing as evidence his perspective on the discount rates used to evaluate the future cash fows of new and risky ventures (i.e., his ability to mathematically explain why some frms deserve a 30%–50% discount rate). Zingales’s novel approach to solving the mortgage crisis was profled in The Economist, and Bruce Bartlett of the National Review Online called his book Saving Capitalism from Capitalists: Unleashing the Power of Financial
Markets to Create Wealth and Spread Opportunity (coauthored with Raghuram G. Rajan; Crown Business, 2003)
“one of the most powerful defenses of the free market ever written.” In 2015, he became director of the school’s
Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State. His students call him an “emerging fnance superstar”— signifcant praise, considering the company he keeps at Chicago Booth.
Social/Community Life
Booth Partners: Booth Partners is an offcial school club that supports the signifcant others and families of Chi- cago Booth students by hosting social events, offering advice about moving to and living in Chicago, and provid- ing a networking resource for members who hope to work and volunteer while in Chicago. During admit weekend, sessions are run by current partners to inform admitted Chicago Booth students and their signifcant others about life at the school, showing, said a partner with whom we spoke, “that the partner is recognized as an important part of the decision-making process.” She added, “Upon acceptance to Booth, not only does the student receive a letter, the partner does as well!”
Partners, with or without children, who move with their students to Chicago Booth can take advantage of what the group has to offer by paying a $150 one-year membership fee or a $230 two-year membership fee. Member- ship benefts include invitations to partner parties, such activities as a Japanese cooking class or a beer-tasting event, and inclusion in sub-clubs, such as a Book Club, a Wine Club, etc. Events take place on average one to four times a week. The Booth Partners website offers information on moving to Chicago, with links to descriptions of area neighborhoods and apartment buildings as well as specifc resources for international students and their signifcant others.
Within the Booth Partners club is Partners of Little Ones (POLO), a resource specifcally for students/partners with children. Said the partner with whom we spoke, “There are lots of resources available to make everyone that is special to a Booth student feel welcomed and cared for! As a Chicago Booth Partner, I have found the Booth Part- ners club to be an excellent organization in which to meet new people and participate in fun, interesting activities.”
Chicago Booth Ski Trip and Tuck Winter Carnival: Candidates who decide to attend Chicago Booth can look for- ward—with hundreds of their closest friends in the community (partners are invited as well)—to the school’s two annual ski trips, which take place in December and February in varying locations. In December 2017, the destina- tion was Aspen, Colorado, for the second year in a row. In February 2016, Chicago Booth students and partners
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 headed for Park City, Utah, for the event. Approximately 400 traveled to Aspen in December 2015, with previous years’ destinations being Vail, Steamboat Springs, Telluride, and Breckenridge. After skiing and snowboarding all day, trip attendees spend their evenings enjoying back-to-back parties.
“There was no shortage of board shorts, bathing suits, Hawaiian shirts, blow-up pool toys, beach balls, and glow sticks on the dance foor,” recalled a second year of a “Summertime Fun” themed party in 2014 on The Booth Ex- perience blog in January 2015, noting, “Half of my suitcase was snowboarding gear, and the rest was costumes.”
Other party themes that year included Choose Your Decade, Ugly Holiday, Boots N’ Brews, and Broomball. The previous year, the participating students donned their “most radical attire,” said a frst year in a January 2014 post on The Booth Experience blog, for an ’80s-themed happy hour before partying late into the night at a “Heaven and
Hell” rave. Other ski trip activities have included a fip cup tournament, a pub crawl, a grilled cheese bake-off, and a visit to a local hot spring. Students and partners who are not interested in skiing or snowboarding can typically take advantage of the selected location’s other offerings, such as spa treatments, bumper cars on ice, snowmobil- ing, and snowshoeing.
Members of the Chicago Booth Ski and Snowboard Club also participate in the annual Tuck Winter Carnival (at
Dartmouth), for which many of the country’s top business schools send teams to compete in a ski race—though we learned the event tends to be more about beer than competition.
Liquidity Preference Function (LPF): LPF gets its name from a fnancial term coined by John Maynard Keynes, and these gatherings are held on Fridays at Hyde Park. Students and their partners/families get together after classes in a communal area in the Harper Center called Winter Garden for free food and drinks. LPF is a school-sponsored event organized by the Graduate Business Council (a group of students elected by the student body to organize activities). LPFs are often theme based, such as the Mentor-Mentee LPF and one at which the Booth Creative
Cultures Club (formerly the Booth Arts Group) displayed the fnalists in a photography contest it sponsored, and music and dance performances were featured.
Random Walks: Each year, Chicago Booth students can choose to take part in one of more than 30 trips abroad, called Random Walks, as an orientation to the school and a way to kick-start their MBA social lives. Three to four second-year students organize each of the weeklong excursions, which take place toward the end of August each year. Because students organize these trips, they can become quite specialized—for example, two trips have typi- cally been offered to Belize, one for singles and one for couples. As trips fll up, they become “suspended” to allow admits from Round 2 time to sign up. Still, students who have their hearts set on a particular destination would be wise to claim a space as early as possible.
Students interested in participating in a Random Walk but have not set their sights on any particular destination can elect to join the “mystery trip,” for which participants do not fnd out where they are going until they arrive at the airport to depart. (In recent years students on the “mystery trip” have traveled to the Galapagos Islands;
Japan; Finland and Estonia; Barcelona, Spain, and Dublin, Ireland; Jordan; and Portugal.) One frst-year student
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 wrote in a 2016 post on the Booth Experience blog: “I couldn’t imagine my Booth Experience without Random Walk, and it seems like this year’s frst years feel the same way,” while another expressed similar sentiments: “Taking part in Random Walk Panama was a fantastic way to kick off my Booth experience. It provided a brilliant oppor- tunity to unwind before diving fully into MBA life, as well as some solid friendships to make the whole thing a bit less daunting.” A third student said simply: “The best part about Random Walk are the relationships you form.”
Thursday Night Drinking Club (TNDC): According to a frst year with whom we spoke, Thursday Night Drinking
Club, or TNDC, is “a Booth tradition that everyone goes to and a weekly staple.” This event is organized by six second-year students (“chairs”) who are hand-chosen by the previous year’s chairs and who select a new location each week where students and their partners/families can gather in downtown Chicago. A member of the Dean’s
Student Admissions Committee told mbaMission that TNDC is “just one part of the vibrant city-based social en- vironment of Booth,” and a recent alumnus remarked, “I think that our Thursday night events were really great because they provided an avenue for all students to come together and hang out outside of school.” Noting that attendance regularly numbers 200–400, a frst-year student we interviewed remarked, “Booth frequently takes over the venue.”
Winter Formal and Spring Fling: Later in the academic year, both frst and second years don their tuxedoes and cocktail dresses to enjoy the Winter Formal, which draws approximately 700 attendees. Students told mbaMission that they enjoy these opportunities to get their energy pumping and break up the long winter with a party. The
Field Museum of Natural History and the Shedd Aquarium have served as the event’s venues in recent years. The
2018 event, which was held at the Field Museum of Natural History, featured a black tie dress code, a dinner, and dancing. The Spring Fling follows, which students we interviewed likened to an American prom. This party has typ- ically been held at Venue SIX10 in downtown Chicago and has even involved a semiformal cruise on Lake Michigan.
Academic Summary
Curriculum: Chicago Booth is renowned for its fexibility—its LEAD Program is the school’s only mandatory course.
Nonetheless, this claim to fexibility can be a bit misleading. Chicago Booth breaks its course selection down into different categories; students must take three foundation courses from among 15 fnancial accounting, microeco- nomics, and statistics options. Then, students must take six courses from the selections offered in the Functions,
Management, and Business Environment categories. Each of these three categories is broken down into subsets: the Functions subset includes fnance, marketing, and operations; the Management subset includes decisions, people, and strategy; and the Business Environment subset is eponymously named. Students must ultimately take six courses from among these seven subsets, for which they have more than 40 options. Thereafter, 11 elec- tive options remain for students among the 21 total courses (including LEAD) they need to complete to graduate.
Students can take up to six courses outside the business school at the University of Chicago.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Grade Disclosure Policy: Chicago Booth students voted in 2001 to adopt a grade nondisclosure policy, preventing recruiters from asking students for information about their grades. This policy is believed to still be in place, given that students have not voted to reverse the decision. However, Chicago Booth’s website notes that this is not an offcial school policy and is therefore not enforced by faculty or staff.
Majors: Rather than offcial majors, Chicago Booth offers students 14 available concentrations, which each require the completion of three to six courses within the study area. Concentrations are not required, but students typi- cally fulfll one to three of the following options:
• Accounting
• Analytic Finance
• Analytic Management
• Econometrics and Statistics
• Economics
• Entrepreneurship
• Finance
• General Management
• International Business
• Managerial and Organizational Behavior
• Marketing Analytics
• Marketing Management
• Operations Management
• Strategic Management
Teaching Method: Chicago Booth does not adhere strictly to one method (case method or lecture). Professors are free to select the format that best fts the subject matter being conveyed.
Research Centers and Initiatives:
• Accounting Research Center
• Applied Theory Initiative
• Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics
• Center for Decision Research
• Center for Research in Security Prices
• Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago
• Fama-Miller Center for Research in Finance
• George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State
• Harry L. Davis Center for Leadership
• Initiative on Global Markets
• James M. Kilts Center for Marketing
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 • Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation
• Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation
Admissions Basics
Note: Any specifcs discussed in this section related to application requirements were valid for the 2017–2018 admis- sions season (unless otherwise noted). Be aware that requirements for any subsequent admissions cycles may differ.
Always check with the school directly to confrm all application details.
The Chicago Booth admissions committee regularly hosts hour-long online chats and gives very candid responses to all sorts of applicant questions. If you have a query or concern about the school’s MBA program or applying to it, these chats provide a forum in which to connect and get “straight talk” on the issue.
Application Process: Once a complete application has been received, it is given to an admissions fellow (a trained second-year student or an admissions staff member), who reads the application and makes a decision as to whether to interview the candidate. The application is then passed on to an admissions director, who reads the application and makes a similar decision. If these two decisions differ, another director breaks the tie with a third decision. When a candidate is interviewed, a subsequent interview report is made, processed, and given to another director, along with the rest of the applicant’s fle, for a third, or possibly fourth, read. That director then votes to either admit the candidate, deny the candidate, or bring the decision to committee for further discussion.
In a 2011 admissions blog post, Associate Dean of Student Recruitment and Admissions Kurt Ahlm described the application process as such: “There is no formula that we use to determine who is admitted. We strive to select the people we feel most thoroughly embody the values that we live every day, which is why each admitted student is reviewed by at minimum fve members of our committee (student fellow, frst admissions director, interviewer, second admissions director, me). As we have tried hard to express to thousands of prospective students who read our materials, attend our events, or visit our campus, our applicant pool is full of interesting and successful people, but not all of them leverage the application in a way that truly conveys strong ft with those values. At the end of the day, it is ft that proves to be our fnal litmus test.”
Admissions Rounds: Although applying in Round 1 rather than Round 2 may confer a slight statistical advantage— because Round 1 involves fewer applications, and no decisions have yet been made (thus, no limit exists at this point on the number of spaces available)—admissions staff at Chicago Booth have emphasized in various com- munications that quality is more important than speed when one is applying to the school and that candidates should wait until Round 2 to submit their application, if necessary, rather than rushing through their application to submit it in Round 1. By Round 3, fewer spaces and scholarships are available. The admissions committee does recommend, however, that international students consider applying in Rounds 1 or 2 so that they may have suf- fcient time to acquire their visas.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 An associate director of admissions noted in a 2010 online chat, “There are some differences between the rounds, but they are nominal. In Round 1, the slate is clean and we have yet to review applications. In Round 2, we typically receive the largest number of applications and make the largest number of admissions offers.” Ahlm similarly commented in a 2012 admissions blog post, “The most common question to the Admissions Committee is ‘When is the best time to apply?’ The answer to this question is quite simple: consider whether or not you’ve leveraged each and every part of the application to support your ft with Booth. When you feel confdent about your application, you are ready to apply.” He added, “Rounds One and Two are competitive, but statistically your chances for admis- sion are almost equal in either. Round Three is more competitive simply because there are fewer spots left in the class. Regardless of the round, the Admissions Committee will always seek the candidates of best ft.”
GMAT/GPA Cutoffs: Chicago Booth has no GMAT or GPA cutoffs and stipulates no ideal score or average. Applicants are evaluated on a holistic basis, and all their attributes are considered (work experience, community/leadership activities, etc.).
Word Limits: Chicago Booth’s admissions committee members expect candidates to adhere to the guidelines pro- vided when asked to submit a written essay.
PowerPoint Presentation/PDF/Essay: For past application seasons, Chicago Booth offered applicants a virtual blank slate as one of the school’s essay questions: four PowerPoint slides with which candidates could do any- thing they pleased. For the 2016–2017 and 2015–2016 cycles, however, candidates were given just one presenta- tion/essay topic and could choose their desired submission format (e.g., PowerPoint, PDF, Word document). For the 2017–2018 application season, the available submissions formats were unchanged, but applicants were asked to choose from a collection of “Booth moments” (pictures from the school’s Instagram account) and base their response on one photo. “Either [format] is fne, and we’re hoping to get a better ‘snapshot’ of who you are and your interests,” a member of the admissions committee explained in a 2014 admissions chat. “At the end of the day, we are looking for you to bring a new element about yourself into the essay, something that you haven’t already shared in other sections of the application,” Kurt Ahlm wrote in a 2015 post on the MBA admissions blog.
Community Leadership: Chicago Booth seeks well-rounded candidates but understands that some careers may limit the amount of activities in which certain applicants can participate. Sometimes, an individual who is “too busy” now can make up for a lack of current involvement once he/she arrives at the school. In a 2011 admissions chat, an associate director of admissions noted, “We value leadership and community involvement in whatev- er form it comes from each individual applicant. Some are really involved in traditional activities, while others choose to get involved in community organizations—churches, nonprofts, etc.” There is no right number of com- munity engagements an applicant should have; the admissions committee is simply trying to understand the candidate’s interests—quality trumps quantity. Applicants should not be hesitant about discussing faith-based community engagements.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Unemployment/Layoffs: The school does not necessarily view a layoff or period of unemployment unfavorably.
International Quotas: Chicago Booth does not have any specifc quotas by country or industry. Student numbers by country fuctuate a great deal each year.
Recommendations: The school requires that applicants submit two letters of recommendation and specifes that one of the two should be provided by a supervisor. If a candidate’s recommenders miss a deadline, the candidate can email the admissions committee to ask for additional time and may be granted a one-week extension. Third recommendations are not recommended, but the school will read them if they seem substantially different from the others. In a 2010 online chat, an associate director of admissions stated, “We ask for two letters. If you submit more than two, make sure the third letter adds value by touching on points your other two may not. This is a place in the application where you’ll want to use your judgment as the committee really only requires two. Think quality over quantity.”
Similarly, an associate director of admissions noted in a 2013 admissions blog post that candidates ought not lose sight of a recommendation’s quality, saying, “Letters of recommendation are a crucial part of the admissions process, and while you may be tempted to impress the Admissions Committee with the connections you’ve made, you’ll want to work with someone who knows you and your accomplishments, talents, and skills well. Your cur- rent or former supervisor and a colleague or client who can speak at length about your value to your company or organization is a much better choice than someone who may have an impressive title, but little insight into you as a person or future Chicago Booth student. Choose your recommenders carefully.” An assistant director of admis- sions made a similar point in a 2012 online chat, saying, “It is important to choose someone who knows you well, has observed your work, and can comment on the areas listed on the reference form.”
Interviews: Interviews are mandatory for admission for all candidates, including reapplicants. The percentage of applicants who are invited to interview is based solely on the quality of the applicant pool, and no set number exists. Traditionally, 40%–60% of applicants are interviewed. Interviews are conducted by admissions committee staff, students, or alumni and are held on campus or in a location convenient for the prospective student. All in- terviews, regardless of who conducts them, receive equal weight in the evaluation process. Interview invitations are randomly distributed. The timing of a candidate’s interview invitation has no bearing on his/her chances of admission.
A 2012 admissions blog post by Ahlm (http://blogs.chicagobooth.edu/blog/Booth_Insider/Preparing_for_Your_
Booth_Interview/boothinsider/75?nav=entry) reminded candidates to dress in business attire and bring a resume to their interview. Ahlm also suggests that candidates ask themselves the following questions in preparation for their interview:
• What do I really want from my MBA experience?
• What can I bring to the Chicago Booth community?
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 • Why is Booth the right place for me?
• How do I plan to use my MBA in my career?
Although interviews are important, they are not “make or break.” Interviewers are primarily attempting to assess the candidate’s ft with the program (i.e., whether the applicant has done his/her due diligence on the school and understands how it connects with his/her MBA needs and career goals). An associate director of admissions said in a 2010 online admissions chat, “Be prepared to tell your story, even if you feel like you’ve already done so. That includes your interest in Booth, your goals, and your motivation for the MBA. Finally, come armed with some great questions to ask your interviewer.”
Similarly, an assistant director of admissions explained in a 2013 post on the Booth Insider Full-Time MBA Ad- missions blog, “We have a long-standing philosophy that the interview is to be a two way exchange—an organic conversation—so our advice still rings quite true. But we’ll never miss an opportunity to remind you that a bit of self-refection is key to good preparation. Don’t neglect to become confdent with the answers to these types of questions: Why do I want an MBA? Why now? How will an MBA help me achieve my goals?”
Said a second year in the same chat about his own experience interviewing at Chicago Booth as a candidate, “My interview was really conversational, and it was really about my interviewer getting to know me and having a feel- ing whether I would have a good ft with the community here.” In a 2013 admissions blog post, Admissions Fellows shared tips with interviewees, echoing this sentiment and saying, “Relax! It is a conversation, not a job interview!” and “Be prepared. Be able to anticipate the interviewer’s questions but, more importantly, be mentally ready. …
Don’t stress out. If you’re here, it means you have talent and have the potential to succeed.”
The Waitlist: Chicago Booth’s waitlist is “used to gauge the pool of candidates in a subsequent round before of- fering a fnal decision to those candidates placed on the waitlist,” states the school’s website. If a candidate is waitlisted, he/she will remain on the list until at least the next round. While the school is unable to provide spe- cifc feedback to waitlisted applicants, it does not rank the candidates on the list, and applicants are welcome to submit supplemental materials. In 2010–2011, Chicago Booth began evaluating applicants who were waitlisted for Round 1 as part of Round 2 admissions decisions. This means that while some applicants may remain on the waitlist, others may receive their decision earlier in the process. Some applicants will not receive a decision until
Round 3, however.
A 2011 Chicago Booth admissions blog post describes a relatively new option available for those on the waitlist.
Waitlisted applicants may now upload a 90-second video for the admissions committee as a way of introducing themselves. Noted an associate director of admissions in this blog entry, “In the age of digital media, we recognize that video is a common tool of communication and want to provide any interested candidate with the opportunity to use it. A video provides the opportunity to create a personal connection in lieu of visiting campus.” An associate director of admissions later expounded on this option a bit in a 2012 online chat, saying, “We offered this as an
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 option to further connect with the Admissions Committee, not to assess your flm-making skills or to cause stress about them! As long as you like what it says about you, your video will be a success!”
Financial Aid: Chicago Booth applicants are offered a merit-based fellowship at the time of their admissions deci- sion, if they have been granted one. These awards are based on the quality of the candidate’s application and on any specifc criteria identifed by the donor. An applicant cannot do anything to enhance his/her chances of gain- ing an award, aside from simply being a meritorious candidate.
Reapplicants: Reapplicants to Chicago Booth should understand that in the eyes of the admissions committee, they are not starting from a “penalty” situation. However, they are expected to have a more profound perspective on their decision to pursue an MBA and a stronger sense of ft with the school than someone who is applying for the frst time. The admissions committee will look to the reapplicant’s current application to provide all the infor- mation needed and will only infrequently go back to and review the candidate’s previous fle.
In response to a question about reapplicants in a 2010 online admissions chat, an associate director of admissions stated, “We evaluate reapplicants much in the same way we evaluate frst-time applicants. Your current applica- tion is reviewed within the larger pool, and we have your previous application on fle in the event that we need to reference it. One of the major differences is the additional question for reapplicants, where we hope to get a sense of what has changed since you last applied.” Reapplicants are directed to a specifc page on the Chicago Booth website: www.chicagobooth.edu/programs/full-time/admissions/apply/reapplicants.
University of Chicago (Booth) Essay Analysis, 2017–2018
For the third year in a row, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business is maintaining its rather unique
“essay” question in which it asks applicants to select from a group of images depicting key moments in the Chi- cago Booth MBA experience and explain why the chosen image “best resonates” with them. When this prompt was frst introduced in 2015–2016, the school offered a collection of 16 photos from which candidates could choose; last year, the group was reduced to ten. This season, Chicago Booth is presenting just six image options. We are unaware of the exact reasons behind this continued minimizing, but we theorize that certain types of photos were rarely chosen or did not elicit the kind of response the admissions committee ultimately felt was helpful in evaluating candidates. Another possibility is that multiple photos may have inspired very similar essays, so only one such picture was needed. Or Chicago Booth may have wanted to focus applicants on specifc aspects of its program and therefore eliminated any images not related to those elements. This year’s photos again come with captions describing the depicted scene—an important factor in this equation in that an individual might be strongly drawn to a particular image, but the associated caption might infuence his or her initial interpretation of it in some way. The bottom line is that with this nontraditional prompt, the school puts a signifcant amount of power in candidates’ hands in letting them select from a group of options, which thereby lets them better control
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 the impression of themselves they want to present. We hope that you will fnd Chicago Booth’s essay question exciting and inspiring, rather than intimidating, and offer the following analysis to help you plan your response.
The following is a collection of shared Booth moments (www.chicagobooth.edu/~/media/ACADEDA-
1984C4ACF939E2947B3C5D90C.aspx). Choose the moment that best resonates with you and tell us why.
• Choose the format that works for you. Want to illustrate your response visually? Submit a slide presenta-
tion. Like to express yourself with words? Write a traditional essay. Use the format that you feel best cap-
tures your response, the Admissions Committee has no preference.
• Determine your own length. There is no prescribed minimum or maximum length. We trust that you will use
your best judgment in determining how long your submission should be, but we recommend that you think
strategically about how to best allocate the space.
Technical Guidelines
• File Size: Maximum fle size is 16 MB.
• Accepted Upload Formats: Acceptable formats are PDF, Word, and PowerPoint. We strongly recommend
converting your piece to a PDF fle prior to submitting.
• Multimedia Restrictions: We will be viewing your submission electronically and in full color, but all submis-
sions will be converted to PDF fles, so animation, video, music, etc. will not translate over.
In offering advice to applicants on how best to approach its unorthodox essay prompt, a member of the Chicago
Booth admissions committee stated on the department’s blog, “Simply put, we want applicants to have fun with the question and let their personality shine through. Focus less on curating a certain image and more on embrac- ing who you are. Please trust when I say that there is no hidden meaning in the prompt.” We sincerely hope you will take the school’s counsel to heart and let go of any fears you might have about choosing the “wrong” image. Every
MBA program’s essay questions share a common purpose—to help the admissions committee learn about you— and this is just a very pure and creative way of approaching the issue. Chicago Booth is not testing you. It is merely offering a novel way of inspiring a discussion about something you feel is fundamental about you—something you want the school to know about who you are, where you have been, and/or where you want to go in the future. The photos provided are very malleable, so they all offer a good opportunity to convey key messages about yourself.
With a little time and contemplation, you should begin to feel a genuine connection with one of the options.
You might pick an image that connects with or recalls an important event from your past that had a signifcant im- pact on you and colors the person you are today. You could instead opt for a photo that relates to your aspirations as a Chicago Booth student or in your career. Another option is to select a picture that elicits a more emotional response from you and correlates with one or more of your core values or beliefs. Perhaps a good approach would be to let the image choose you, so to speak. With this essay—as with all application essays, of course—being sin- cere is crucial, so you will likely be able to craft your most compelling response when you feel a genuine attraction
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 to the photo you choose. And do not merely identify an attribute in a photo and riff for a thousand words on what you feel are your most impressive accomplishments; instead, really get to the heart of how and why the image speaks to you personally. If you truly own your experiences and provide suffcient detail in showcasing them, your message will come across as authentic.
You can choose from multiple format options beyond the traditional essay for your submission, which no doubt adds to this prompt’s intimidation factor for some applicants. We offer no recommendation with respect to whether a written essay, a PowerPoint presentation, or any other format is “best” in this case. Opportunities are certainly available in both traditional and creative approaches, depending on where your strengths lie. We do, however, recommend that if you choose to write an essay, you limit yourself to no more than a thousand words.
Optional Essay: Is there any additional information that you would like the Admissions Committee to know? If so, please address in an optional essay. (300 words maximum)
Chicago Booth’s optional essay prompt is rather open-ended in that it does not specify that you discuss only problem areas in your candidacy, though it does restrict you to just 300 words. Nevertheless, this is still your op- portunity to address—if you need to—any lingering questions that an admissions offcer might have about your candidacy, such as a low GMAT or GRE score, a poor grade or overall GPA, or a gap in your work experience. Do not simply try to fll this space because you fear that not doing so would somehow count against you. And how- ever tempted you might be, this is not the place to reuse a strong essay you wrote for another school or to offer a few anecdotes you were unable to share in your required essay. But if you truly feel that you must emphasize or explain something that would render your application incomplete if omitted, write a very brief piece on this key aspect of your profle. For more guidance, we encourage you to download your free copy of our mbaMission
Optional Essays Guide (https://shop.mbamission.com/products/mbamission-optional-essays-guide), in which we offer detailed advice on when and how to take advantage of the optional essay, with multiple examples, to help you mitigate any problem areas in your application.
Reapplicant Essay: Upon refection, how has your perspective regarding your future, Chicago Booth, and/or get- ting an MBA changed since the time of your last application? (300 words maximum)
With this essay question, Chicago Booth is testing your resolve and your reasoning. We surmise that the school wants to be certain you are not just stubbornly following a path and trying to “fnish what you started,” so to speak, but that you have truly reassessed your needs in the aftermath of your unfortunate rejection. We recom- mend that you discuss your subsequent growth and development as they pertain to additional personal and professional discovery, which validates your need for an MBA. In the interim, some of your interests or goals may have changed—that is not a bad thing, and the admissions committee will not automatically assume that you are
“wishy-washy,” unless you give them good reason to do so. Just be sure that any of your goals that have changed still logically connect to your overall story and desire for an MBA. Your aspirations—new or original—need to rep- resent a compelling progression of the growth you have achieved in the past year.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Post-Interview Essay:
If you are fortunate enough to be invited to interview with Chicago Booth, you will then need to write and submit an additional essay of 250 words in response to one of the following three prompts:
1) Share a photo you think would resonate with us and tell us why.
Interestingly, after having applicants write about a selected photo offered by the school, Chicago Booth is asking for yet another commentary on a selected photo, though in this case, you have total control of the choice of snap- shot. This essay option might appeal to some candidates with whom the initial exercise of picking and analyzing a photo resonated and to whom doing so came fairly easily. We imagine that other applicants will steer clear of this question, however, having done more than enough photo assessment for one season. One key thing to note here is that the school is not asking for a photo that resonates with you but instead one that you believe would resonate with it. You will need to draw on your (we hope by now rather extensive) knowledge and understanding of the Chicago Booth program and identify a picture that aligns with one or more of its primary tenets. Note also that the photo does not to be one of you or even one that you have taken.
We interpret this prompt as a way for the school to test once again your grasp of what the Chicago Booth experi- ence entails. Do you truly understand what being a Chicago Booth MBA student will be like? Are you ready for the experience? Are you coming into the program with open eyes and an open mind? If you successfully choose a photo that can objectively be deemed complementary to the school’s community and program, you will convey to the admissions committee that you do indeed “get it” and are ready to get started. Unfortunately, we cannot tell you specifcally what such a photo would be, but we hope that if you have really researched the school, spoken frsthand with students and alumni, visited the campus (if possible), and given sincere thought to what you want from an MBA program and what Chicago Booth in particular offers that is important to you and to achieving your goals, you should be able to identify an effective picture with fairly minimal effort.
2) What motivates you?
This prompt appears to be a very straightforward, no-nonsense request for information. If you are putting forth the effort and time necessary to pursue an MBA and are ready to take on the two-year challenge of earning one, we have to assume that something is driving you to do so. Very simply, what is that thing? This query’s simplicity might make it challenging for some applicants, but if you have a real fre in your belly, as they say, that is push- ing you forward in life, you should be able to articulate this for the admissions committee. Be sure to go beyond simply stating what motivates you and provide some clarifying context as to how and even why. If your children motivate you, for example, what exactly about them is compelling you to take this step? Do you wish to secure a stable fnancial future for them? Do you hope to make them proud through your success? Do you want to start a business that you could later hand down to them? And why is any of this important to you? The school obviously
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 wants to know what is driving you, but revealing a fuller picture of the source of your aspirations will be key to crafting a truly compelling essay.
3) What was the last thing you searched on the internet and what does that reveal about you?
We caution you here to be sincere and not try to anticipate what the admissions committee might consider an impressive or particularly interesting topic. If you spent some time looking up cute cat videos to give yourself a cerebral break between work projects so you could start the next one refreshed and with a clean mental slate, saying so would be better than pretending that you instead spent time researching Newton’s third law of phys- ics, just because that option might sound better. Authenticity is key. The school is seeking another window into your personality, so keep that goal in mind as you craft your essay. Note that the query asks what your search topic reveals about you, so beyond simply sharing the subject of your web search and the reason behind it, be sure to elaborate a bit on how it all relates to you as an individual—either personally or professionally, or perhaps both. Given that you have a week in which to respond to this query and that Google alone processes more than
40,000 searches every second, we doubt the school expects you to share what was literally the last thing you re- searched before reading the question, so you do have some small measure of wiggle room (but again, avoid being disingenuous and creating an artifcial answer for supposed effect). Instead, consider the last several things you researched, pinpoint the one you feel would reveal the most about you to the admissions committee, and then fll in the blanks as we have advised.
Many MBA candidates fnd admissions interviews stressful and intimidating, but mastering this important element of the application process is defnitely possible—the key is informed preparation. And, on your way to this high level of preparation, we offer our free Interview Primers (http://shop.mbamission.com/collections/interview- primers) to spur you along! Download your free copy of the Chicago Booth School of Business Interview Primer
(https://shop.mbamission.com/products/chicago-booth-school-of-business) today.
mbaMission’s Exclusive Interview with University of Chicago Booth School of Business Associate Dean of Student Recruitment and Admissions Kurt Ahlm
April 2011
mbaMission: Chicago Booth is known for fnance. What is it not known for that you believe it should be known for?
Kurt Ahlm: Chicago Booth is a breeding ground for critical thinkers. Our graduates are analytical problem solvers who can apply what they learn here to successful careers in any number of felds. Booth has strength in many ar- eas beyond fnance, including entrepreneurship and marketing. Our Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship provides unparalleled programming for our students, through labs in PE [Private Equity], VC [Venture Capitalism], Cleantech and Social Entrepreneurship, to lecture series and networking support, to helping students launch businesses
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 through the New Venture Challenge. The Kilts Center for Marketing provides similar support to marketing students and recently entered into an exclusive agreement with AC Nielsen to share three major databases which put Booth at the forefront of thinking about marketing and consumer behavior. Partnerships like this show that Chicago
Booth provides analytics and critical thought across a variety of disciplines beyond just fnance.
mbaMission: Chicago Booth is probably equally well known for its fexibility—where students do not have a pre- scribed frst-year curriculum, but choose classes from core offerings. Could you discuss some of the support that students receive to help them ensure they choose wisely?
KA: Chicago Booth offers the most fexible curriculum of any of the top business schools and has done so since its founding over 100 years ago. We have decades of experience behind us in creating a culture that supports a multitude of choices a student is faced with while they’re here. We have one of the largest administrative staffs of any of the top business schools, despite enrolling a class that is smaller than [that of] many of our closest peers.
These staff members are experienced professionals who offer one-on-one support for our students and who cre- ate the best academic experience for them. When you couple this guidance with second-year students who serve as a valuable resource for frst years, you’ll see that Booth is unmatched in the amount of resources and support it provides its students to help them make the best decisions in planning their curriculum and careers.
mbaMission: Sticking with the theme of what the school is known for … clearly, Chicago Booth has a variety of distinguished professors. Does the school have any professors who may be less well known for their research but are instead known for their teaching styles? Can you tell us about one or two “true” teachers at Chicago Booth and how they bring creative or innovative methods to the classroom?
KA: There are far too many names to choose from. Being in a Chicago Booth classroom is a very special experience, no matter who is teaching. The commitment to teaching is embedded deep in our culture, and it is something we not only take pride in but we it is something we are recognized for. Among the top ten business schools ranked by Bloomberg Businessweek in 2010, Booth was the only school to receive an outstanding rating for teaching. Stu- dents here can explore any class and experience thought-provoking and innovative ideas every day.
mbaMission: Does the admissions offce have any directives at all to increase a “type” of applicant—to accept younger applicants, for example, or to increase the proportion of international students or women? Does the school strive to have each class refect something specifc?
KA: No. At Booth, we do not employ any quotas in our review process. We simply look to enroll a diverse, smart group of students, who ft well with the values and culture of Booth. Innovation and world-changing ideas are born in an environment made up of people of all ages, ethnicities, backgrounds, professions, gender etc. We want to maintain that same commitment to welcoming a diverse mix that has propelled us for generations.
mbaMission: Do you consult with the career services offce before making admissions offers?
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 KA: We work with many offces at Booth to help us to understand how we can refne our selection process. Togeth- er we explore what attributes correlate well with success here and after graduation. Understanding how Booth students navigate their academic and career objectives during their two years is tremendously important to how we think about the application evaluation process. So although we leverage our community to help us understand and recognize ft, it is solely the role of the admissions offce to select those students who are eventually admit- ted to the program.
mbaMission: When you read an applicant’s fle, where do you start? With the candidate’s resume? With the Pow- erPoint submission?
KA: At Booth our process is iterative, with many committee members reviewing an applicant’s fle before a fnal decision is made. We calibrate our review process to make sure we all are looking for similar elements of ft, but we all investigate the application a little differently. I tend to follow the order of the application: personal informa- tion, professional information, academics, essays (including the slide presentation), letters of recommendation.
mbaMission: No business school is for everyone—who would you say Chicago Booth is not for?
KA: I would say Chicago Booth is not for people who are simply looking for a credential to add to their resume. At
Booth, the MBA is the culmination of two years of exploring your interests, engaging your mind and learning how to think critically about markets and organizations. There is no cookie-cutter approach here, no single way to get a degree, so unless a student is prepared to step in, create a path and leverage the full range of opportunities in front of them, this will not be a good ft.
mbaMission: For joint degree applicants, is there any “pull”? Meaning, if you want to accept a certain joint degree applicant, will you advocate on his/her behalf to help the applicant also gain admission to, say, the Harris School?
Similarly, when a married couple applies together, do you make admissions decisions with the couple in mind—try- ing to bring in both spouses?
KA: All applicants to Booth have to be able to get into the program on their own merits. Although we want to be mindful of applicants applying with a spouse, partner, or signifcant other, that will not tip the scale for someone who is not prepared to handle the challenges of an MBA program. My answer to this question is the same as the answer I would provide to a question on joint degrees.
mbaMission: How would you describe the tenor of the typical admissions interview at Chicago Booth?
KA: The interview process is not meant to be an intense experience, it is meant to be a conversation between two interested parties. It is an opportunity for us to meet a candidate and hear why they believe they are a good ft for
Booth, while at the same time allowing the interviewer to convey what makes our program distinctive. Our goal at
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 the end of the interview is to have both parties walk away feeling that they learned something meaningful from the conversation.
mbaMission: What advice would you give to a candidate to help him/her prepare to apply to Chicago Booth?
KA: Take time to thoroughly think through your objectives for business school. Why do you want an MBA? What skills or experiences do you hope to gain? How do you prefer to learn? How do all of these things put you in a bet- ter position to accomplish your short- and long-term goals? These are just some of the questions I push people to consider as they begin their application preparation. The more focused and on point an applicant is, the more compelling their application will be and the more prepared they will be to successfully start an MBA program. A two-year MBA program moves quickly regardless where you go, and if you have not fully vetted your reasons for being at that school, you can fall behind pretty quickly. The more thinking and planning you do on the front end, the greater overall success you will have throughout the entire MBA experience.
mbaMission: What percentage of Chicago Booth candidates are typically interviewed?
KA: This percentage can vary from year to year, depending on the strength of the pool, but in general we interview between 40% and 50% of those who apply.
mbaMission: How informed do you think candidates are in general? Do you think the average Chicago Booth ap- plicant knows what he/she would be in for?
KA: Yes, because at Chicago Booth we strive to be as transparent as possible. Our staff and students work hard to be accessible; we push a lot of content out to prospective students through email, our website and a variety of so- cial media platforms. We have a comprehensive campus visit program and we conduct receptions in cities around the world. Because ft with program is so important to our selection process, we try to eliminate any ambiguity about who we are and how to prepare to be successful here. So my guess is Chicago applicants are well aware of what to expect from this place by the time they enroll
Insider Interview: Alumna, University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Class of 2012
Having grown up in New York, the recent Chicago Booth alumna we interviewed attended an undergraduate institu- tion in the city, majoring in fnance and accounting. Multiple internships during her college years led her ultimately to a summer position in the health care investment banking group of a large frm—an opportunity that turned into a full-time analyst position that lasted two years. She then became interested in switching to a career in private equity, and this inspired her to pursue her MBA.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 mbaMission: Thank you so much for speaking with us about your experience at Chicago Booth. How did you ulti- mately choose the school for your MBA?
Chicago Booth Alumna: Sure. Well, I wanted to go into private equity, but I didn’t want to do health care services.
When I was choosing colleges, I had gotten into the four-year business program at [a New York–based college] and
I also had gotten into a seven-year med program. So I was trying to choose between medicine and business, and
I’d always loved science. So when I went into the four-year business program, I knew I wanted to be in health care in some form, I just didn’t know what. And that’s why I chose health care investment banking. So when I got out of my two years as an analyst, I didn’t want to go to a large traditional shop, just because I’d be doing something very similar to what I’d been doing as an analyst. So I wanted to go to a smaller PE [private equity] shop that focused more on pharma/biotech. I was at [a New York frm] for about two and a half years, and then applied to business school in the middle of my third year.
So I was specifcally looking at just health care programs, so Penn [Wharton] and Duke [Fuqua] were at the top of my list. I actually hadn’t even thought about Booth. It wasn’t on my radar at all, but I had a really good friend from undergrad that went there, and so I went to go visit her when I was in Chicago and visiting Northwestern [Kellogg].
So when I went to visit her, I loved the school. I loved everybody that I met. It was a great personality ft, and I didn’t feel that personality ft anywhere else. And so I applied to Booth, was actually on the waitlist and then got accepted off the waitlist. I was actually going to go to Duke [Fuqua]. I had gotten into Duke. They had given me some money as well, and then I got into Booth off the waitlist and lost my deposit and stuff, which is fne.
I kind of had go to business school because I felt like I didn’t have enough of a fnance background, especially after being in banking PE, and what I wanted to do was very specifc. I wanted to be in corporate development at a large pharma/biotech company, and I wanted to work in M&A [mergers and acquisitions]. I wanted to work in industry for a while in terms of my long-term plans and going back to being on the investing side, because I knew how important having industry expertise is before I go back. And so I wanted to get that experience, and I wanted to kind of get my life back, because I’d been working 100-hour weeks for years. I just wanted some semblance of work/life balance before I went back to it later. So my goal was very specifc. I actually tried to do it without going to business school, but every company that I spoke to was like, “We want an MBA.” And so I thought, “All right,
I guess I’m going back to get an MBA.” So it wasn’t in my mind an ideal choice, but I wouldn’t have changed the experience at all.
mbaMission: So did Chicago Booth’s career development offce help you with fnding the job that you wanted?
CBA: They were actually really helpful. Because I was so focused, it was a lot easier for them to go out and be like,
“Okay, this is your list of companies. Let’s start fnding alums,” and they helped me compile a list of alumni at a lot of these companies that I could just start talking to. Some were active alums with the school, and so they were pretty easy, but even alums that weren’t as active, once I emailed them, they were very helpful. There weren’t a
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 lot of people on the fnance end at a lot of the pharma companies, there were a lot more on the marketing end, but they knew a lot of the fnance folks.
I actually started talking to career services right as I got in at the end of May, the middle of June. I didn’t go to any admit weekends. I just contacted them and was like, “Hey, I’m a newly admitted student, and this is what I am looking for.” I wanted to start conversations over the summer, because the advice that I had gotten was that things just get really crazy when you’re a frst year. So I wanted to get a head start during the summer. I was working at a nonproft in New York part-time, but I thought that this would be a good way to segue into school and talking to people. A lot of the alums were really great in terms of connecting me. It just took two or three connections to get to the right person to speak to, which was expected.
mbaMission: Sure. What resources at Chicago Booth do you think were most helpful in preparing you for the job that you have now?
CBA: I think two areas. I think the frst one is the Polsky Center, which is our center for entrepreneurship. We have something called a PEVC [private equity venture capital] Lab, which is basically where you get to go in and work at a private equity or venture capital shop in Chicago while you’re going to school, and then you take a class in the evening to kind of augment that experience. And so I had done that when I was a frst year, and I thought that that was really great in terms of introducing me to VC. I did a health care VC shop at that point. And I thought it was a really great segue from doing later-season investing to earlier-season investing, and it also connected me with the Chicago investing community. Because I was coming from New York, my entire network was in New York, so I didn’t know a ton of people in Chicago in the PEVC community. And I got to know the start-ups really well, I got to know the incubators really well, and I got to know a lot of the professionals.
mbaMission: That sounds exciting. How would you describe your classmates and the Chicago Booth community?
CBA: I’m trying to think of like a good way to describe it. Whenever somebody came onto campus—and I did a ton of tours, I was a LEAD facilitator—and I would talk to prospective students, the one thing that I would say to them was that you need to make sure it’s a personality ft for whatever school you go to. Any top ten school you’re go- ing to go to, you’re going to get a great education, you’re going to have a great alumni network, but you just have to make sure that you feel like you can ft into the community and can have friends that are going to be with you going forward. So that’s the thing for me—it was a great personality ft. It was a mix of people that are obviously, you know, really nerdy and love talking about weird topics but at the same time could just have fun. And I think that everybody came into school with a great mentality of “Let’s make a network and let’s keep it strong.” I’ve seen that a ton in terms of everybody in my class keeping in touch, everybody still being engaged with the community and with our smaller network. And I think that if everybody goes in with that mentality, you’ve got a much stronger bond coming out of it.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 mbaMission: Defnitely. A lot of the top business schools separate incoming students into sections or cohorts, but
Chicago Booth doesn’t do that to my understanding. Did that affect your ability to bond with your classmates or make good friends in any way?
CBA: You actually do get cohorts when you frst start, but it’s only for the frst class [LEAD, the Leadership Effec- tiveness and Development program]. So you get a cohort for that, but it’s literally for the frst 12 weeks of your business school experience, which I think is great, because when you’re frst coming in and you’re meeting new people, it’s great to have a way to do it. But I think that once you’re a couple months in, you kind of know what you’re doing. And so at that point, you can tailor your experience to whatever you want it to be in terms of what your groups are, what classes you’re taking, what you’re recruiting for, all that sort of stuff. So I think it’s a great starting point and then it allows you to do what you want with it going forward. So you still do have kind of a cohort experience, but it’s not forced upon you for the entire two years that you’re there.
mbaMission: Sure. So what was your impression of Dean [Sunil] Kumar?
CBA: I started in 2010. So Dean Kumar was kind of six months in, and I think it was a pretty easy transition. Dean
[Stacey] Kole is our dean of students, and she heads up a lot of the work that we do and interactions that we have.
And Dean Kumar’s been a great kind of proponent, but we didn’t actually have a ton of interaction with him. I think he was still trying, in the frst year that I was there, to get himself up to speed and meet all of our alums, all that sort of stuff. He was a lot more involved my second year in terms of student events and that sort of thing. And I think he actually fts the personality of Chicago pretty well, because, in a sense, he’s kind of nerdy and quantita- tive, but at the same time, he’s pretty funny. He’s just a very approachable person, I’d say. I think that you want your dean to somehow ft the personality that a lot of people at the school have. I guess “approachable” is a good word for it, or “real” is a good word to describe it.
mbaMission: That’s great. Where did you live when you were a student?
CBA: I lived in downtown Chicago. So the majority of students actually live in Lakeshore East. It’s right downtown.
You can take the metro down, which is like a 15-minute ride, 20-minute ride in the morning, and a lot of the build- ings actually connect to the metro. So in the wintertime, you can actually just walk inside and get to the metro to go down to school. A lot of the students really wanted to have places to go have dinner and have social events and all that sort of stuff, and so they tend to live downtown. A lot of frst years tend to live in Lakeshore East, and then a lot of people migrate north to Wicker Park, to Gold Coast, a lot more of the residential-type areas when they’re second year, so you can get more of a favor for Chicago rather than just being super close to Michigan Avenue.
mbaMission: How would you characterize social life at the school? How much do students tend to stay on campus versus branching out into the city?
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 CBA: I think the majority of our stuff, our social events or evening social events, were all in the city. There were a couple of things in Hyde Park when we were second years, like graduation-type ceremonies and that sort of thing, but the majority of our events were all in downtown or in the Chicago area in a sense. All of our TNDCs [Thursday
Night Drinking Club events] were downtown. When you think about our student population, I don’t know the exact stats, but I would say that 80% of our students lived downtown, and that the 20% that did live in Hyde Park had families. They wanted a house, that sort of thing. They tended to live closer to the campus, but everybody else lived downtown or a little bit north. So that’s why a lot of our events tended to be over there.
mbaMission: I see. Are there any particular social events that are not to be missed?
CBA: I think the one that I always pointed out was Random Walk. So I guess it’s not really a weekly social event, but for me, Random Walk was great. I went to Ecuador my frst year and then to South Africa my second year. And
I think it’s really just a good experience. Before you even start school, you’re meeting like 18 other people that you know when you’re going in and you’ve had a shared experience with them, traveling in a random country somewhere. It’s kind of like [MTV’s] The Real World, where you’re putting 18 strangers together and seeing how it all works out. And it ends up being just a great bonding experience in terms of the experiences that you have, the places you see. Then when you start school, all of you are not going to be in the same cohort. So you not only have friends that are in your cohort, but you have friends outside your cohort that you know because you went on
Random Walk with them. It’s just a great social experience in terms of meeting new people that you wouldn’t have necessarily met otherwise.
mbaMission: Defnitely. Did you go on any treks while you were a student?
CBA: So those are like the fun kind of treks, but I went on our VC trek when I was a frst year. We spent a week in
San Francisco just visiting a lot of different VC funds and start-ups in San Francisco. We were meeting with a ton of Booth alumni and all that sort of stuff when we were there, networking and seeing the industry, seeing what they’re doing, seeing if this something that you’re interested in, that sort of thing.
mbaMission: Right. That sounds great. As far as the facilities at Chicago Booth, what would you say are the best parts and some areas that the school could maybe work on?
CBA: I think all of our facilities are actually pretty new, and so everything’s pretty great. All of our classrooms are super high tech. So I think facilities-wise, our new building is pretty amazing. There’s a ton of places to read, do your homework. There’s places to have meetings. There’s Wif everywhere. It’s pretty amazing in terms of the architecture. And we all, I think, took advantage of being on the University of Chicago campus, too. Some of the other buildings are older and more historic, and it was actually just a very pretty campus, too.
mbaMission: Right. Did you go to Booth with a partner or a signifcant other?
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 CBA: No, I didn’t, but there’s a partners club that’s pretty active. And all of our social events were pretty open, so all of the partners came to a ton of our social events. I think that any partner in that situation is going to be a little bit put off by all of the business school talk, you know? But I think that all of them were really great sports in terms of meeting us, and we were all very inclusive of them, too, just trying to make sure that they felt at home and involved. And they’re invited to everything as well.
mbaMission: Did you have any professors that really impressed you?
CBA: One of the things I wanted to do coming into Booth was that I had such a super heavy fnance background that I was fnanced out to a certain degree. So when I came to school, I took a lot of strategy classes, operations classes. I took a lot of classes that were kind of outside that realm. I took marketing classes that were outside of what I had done before. And so I took a couple of entrepreneurship classes, just things that were different that
I hadn’t learned about before. That’s the way I tailored my experience. I’d taken one or two fnance classes, just initially, and they were more of the higher-level ones just because it was something that I wanted to make sure I brushed up on, but I that’s the way that I tailored my experience.
The one class that I do want to mention was I took Professor [Scott] Meadow for “Commercializing Innovation,” and I thought that was a really great class. Basically, the class is like a week-long due diligence session for dif- ferent companies. So it’s over ten weeks. You have ten different companies, and you work in a group of four or fve people, and you do due diligence and you present at the end of it what your recommendation is—should you invest, should you not invest. If you do invest, then what’s your plan, that sort of thing, and if you don’t invest, then what’s your rationale and how would you move forward?
So it’s just a great way to practice and look at another way to evaluate a company. I think that when I was [working in New York], my partners evaluated a company one way, but this is another way of evaluating a company accord- ing to Professor Meadow, and Professor Meadow’s worked in venture, worked in PE, has all of that real-world ex- perience. So I was really able to apply what his methodology is to a lot of different companies in a lot of different areas. It was great to learn a different way to do it, and you can obviously take it and apply it in whatever frm you go to or take snippets of it and use it in other places.
mbaMission: Defnitely. How would you characterize the faculty overall?
CBA: I would say that it was a really good mix of classroom teaching and case studies. I thought it was really help- ful to get lectures on certain topics and then to use a case study as an application of them. I just thought, for me, it made a ton of sense to learn some of the theories frst and then to do more applications of them, do real-world scenarios and that sort of thing.
Oh, one of my other favorite professors is Professor [Nicholas] Epley. He did more of a behavioral kind of analysis class, where you got to know some of the psychology behind making decisions and also what people’s biases are,
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 how that works. He’s done a ton of research behind that, and it was great to get that soft learning behind decision making and work with other teams and other people, just because it’s obviously something that you’re going to be doing in the real world. So it was defnitely great to have that as kind of the background in terms of a lecture-type class, too.
mbaMission: What do you think people should know about Chicago Booth that probably most people don’t know, particularly candidates who might be considering the school—or who are not considering it and should?
CBA: I think that candidates need to go and visit the campus and see how they see themselves ftting in personal- ity-wise. So I would just say to every candidate to go and visit, because I think that that will change your view and will give you more perspective on the school. I feel like there’s a lot of misconceptions about different schools, and different schools are known for different things, obviously. But I don’t think any school wants to be branded as “the marketing school,” “the fnance school,” that sort of thing. I feel like there’s a lot of different components to it, and Chicago’s also been branded a certain way—“they’re quant heavy and that’s their thing.” That’s obviously part of it, but I feel like there’s so many other elements that you just need to go and meet the students. Because I think that will really be the selling point for the school.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Appendix: Chicago Booth Facts and Figures
Note: Facts and fgures in this section are prone to change. Occasionally, conficts may exist between the school’s publications and its web pages. Applicants are urged to recheck facts and fgures for the most up-to-date information.
Basics
Year Established: 1898
Location: Chicago, Illinois; London, England; Hong Kong, China (London and Hong Kong are executive campuses)
Dean: Madhav Rajan (August 2017)
Associate Dean for Student Recruitment and Admissions: Kurt Ahlm (2011)
Programs:
• Full-Time MBA
• Evening MBA
• Executive Education
• Weekend MBA
• Executive MBA
• PhD
• Summer Business Scholars
Joint Degrees:
• MBA/MA in international relations or area studies (South Asia, Eastern Europe/Russia, Latin America & the
Caribbean, and the Middle East)
• MBA/MPP with the Harris Graduate School of Public Policy
• MBA/JD with the University of Chicago Law School
• MBA/MD with the Pritzker School of Medicine
• MBA/MA with the School of Social Service Administration
• MBA/MPCS with the Department of Computer Science
• MBA/Graduate Program in Health Administration and Policy
Class Profle (Class of 2019)
Class Size: 582
Average GMAT: 730
GMAT Range: 620–790
Applicants Who Reported a GRE Score: 7%
Average Work Experience: 5 years
Average GPA: 3.6
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 GPA Range: 2.72–4.0
Average Student Age: 28
Countries Represented: 59
Female Representation: 40%
U.S. Minority Students: 27%
International Students: 36%
Employment Statistics (Class of 2017)
Median Base Salary: $125,000
Median Signing Bonus: $25,000
Graduates accepted positions in the following industries:
• Consulting: 32.6%
• Financial Services: 29.9%
Investment Banking/Brokerage: 13.6%
Diversifed Financial Services: 3.9%
Investment Management/Research: 5.5%
Private Equity: 4.7%
Insurance: 0.4%
Venture Capital: 1.8%
• Technology: 18.7%
E-Commerce and Internet: 9.4%
Software: 4.3%Hardware: 3.9%Financial Technology: 0.6%
Telecommunications: 0.4%
Services: 0.2%
• Consumer Products: 5.3%
• Health Care Products and Services: 2.9%
• Manufacturing/Chemicals/Plastics: 2.0%
• Retail: 1.8%
• Education/Government/Nonproft: 1.4%
• Agribusiness: 1.2%
• Transportation Services Equipment: 1.2%
• Other: 1.0%
• Energy: 0.8%
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Graduates accepted positions in the following functions:
• Consulting: 36.3%
• Finance: 35.6%
Investment Banking: 14.7%
Investment Management/Research: 8.4%
Company Finance (Analysis/Treasury): 6.5%
Private Equity: 4.7%
Venture Capital: 2.4%
Other Finance: 1.2%
• Marketing – Brand/Product Management: 6.9%
• Project Management (Tech): 6.3%
• General Management: 5.7%
• Corporate Strategy/Strategic Planning: 3.9%
• Operations – Production/Supply Chain Management/Logistics: 3.3%
• Business Development: 1.6%
• Analytics/Data Science: 0.4%
Graduates accepted positions in the following locations:
• United States: 89.4%
Midwest: 36.0%
Chicago: 31.2%
Minneapolis: 2.2%
Northeast: 22.8%
New York: 19.1%
Boston: 3.3%
West: 21.6%
Bay Area: 11.4%
Seattle: 6.5%
Los Angeles: 2.6%
Southwest: 4.5%
Dallas: 2.0%
Houston: 1.2%
Denver: 1.0%
South: 2.4%
Mid-Atlantic: 2.0%
• International: 10.6%
Asia: 3.7%
Hong Kong: 1.4%
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Europe: 2.9%
London: 1.4%
Latin America and the Caribbean: 2.2%
Middle East and North Africa: 0.8%
Australia: 0.6%
Canada: 0.2%
Major Employers (companies that hired four or more graduates in 2017):
• McKinsey & Company, Inc.: 48
• Amazon.com, Inc.: 26
• The Boston Consulting Group: 26
• Bain & Company, Inc.: 22
• Accenture: 13
• Morgan Stanley: 11
• Bank of America Merrill Lynch: 9
• Goldman Sachs Group Inc.: 9
• JPMorgan Chase & Co.: 9
• Adobe Systems Incorporated: 8
• A.T. Kearney, Inc.: 7
• Deutsche Bank AG: 7
• L.E.K. Consulting: 7
• Citigroup, Inc.: 6
• Deloitte Consulting: 6
• Evercore Partners Inc.: 6
• Google Inc.: 6
• Microsoft Corporation: 6
• Barclays Capital: 5
• Cargill, Inc.: 5
• Credit Suisse: 5
• Ecolab, Inc.: 5
• International Business Machines Corp.: 5
• PwC Strategy&: 5
• Tyson Foods Inc.: 5
• Apple Inc.: 4
• Nestle USA, Inc.: 4
• Pepsico, Inc.: 4
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Bibliography
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“2014 Herman Family Fellow Named.” Inside Rensselaer. January 22, 2015. www.insiderensselaer.com/
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Ahlm, Kurt. “Preparing for Your Booth Interview.” Booth Insider admissions blog. November 6, 2013.
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Ahlm, Kurt. “Preparing Your Round One Application.” Booth Insider admissions blog. September 27, 2012.
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Ahlm, Kurt. “Round Two Application Update.” Booth Insider admissions blog. March 3, 2011.
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Antoš, David. “Madhav Rajan: ‘I’m Exactly Where I’d Like to Be.’” Chicago Business. May 18, 2017.
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“BallotReady Takes Home First Place at 2015 Social New Venture Challenge Finals.” Chicago Booth News. May 29,
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new-venture-challenge-fnals
“The Best 295 Business Schools.” Princeton Review. 2014 edition. October 8, 2013. www.princetonreview.com/
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“The Best 296 Business Schools.” Princeton Review. 2015 edition. October 7, 2014. www.princetonreview.com/
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 “Best Business Schools 2015” Bloomberg Businessweek. October 20, 2015. www.bloomberg.com/features/
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“Best Business Schools 2016” Bloomberg Businessweek. November 18, 2016. www.bloomberg.com/features/
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“Best Business Schools 2016.” U.S. News & World Report. March 10, 2015.
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“Best Business Schools 2017.” U.S. News & World Report. March 15, 2016.
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“Best Business Schools 2018.” U.S. News & World Report. March 14, 2017. www.usnews.com/ best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/mba-rankings
“Best Business Schools 2019.” U.S. News & World Report. March 20, 2018. www.usnews.com/ best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/mba-rankings
“The Best U.S. Business Schools 2010.” Bloomberg Businessweek. November 11, 2010. www.businessweek.com/
bschools/content/nov2010/bs20101110_255552.htm
“Booth ‘After Hours.’” The Booth Experience student blog. March 3, 2012. http://boothstudents.blogspot.com/
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Byrne, John A. “Booth Dean Leaving for John Hopkins.” Poets&Quants. July 15, 2016. http://poetsandquants.com/
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Byrne, John A. “Chicago’s New Dean Pursues Globalization, Stronger Alumni Network.” Poets&Quants. February
27, 2011. http://poetsandquants.com/2011/02/27/chicagos-new-dean-pursues-globalization-stronger-alumni-
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Byrne, John A. “The Gatekeeper to Chicago Booth.” Poets&Quants. September 9, 2012.
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Byrne, John A. “A Tale of Two Schools: Kellogg vs. Booth.” Poets&Quants. December 6, 2012.
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Byrne, John A. “Wharton Dislodges Harvard to Top 2017 P&Q MBA Ranking.” Poets&Quants. November 27, 2017.
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Carter, Andrea. “The Best 40 B-School Professors Under the Age of 40.” Poets&Quants. February 15, 2011.
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Challenge Everything: The Full-Time MBA Program. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Graduate School of
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“Chat Transcript: Chicago Booth Admissions.” Bloomberg Businessweek. January 24, 2011.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 “The Complete 2014 Business School Ranking.” Bloomberg Businessweek. November 11, 2014.
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Damodara, Nish, and Matt Thorne. “Booth’s Million Dollar Student Managed Investment Fund Clocks Above
Average Returns.” Chicago Business. November 3, 2014. www.chibus.com/news/2014/11/3/
booths-million-dollar-student-managed-investment-fund-clocks-above-average-returns
“A Day in the Life: A Booth Couple Edition.” The Booth Experience blog. November 29, 2016.
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DiMattia, Michelle. “A Week to Remember: Booth Ski Trip!” The Booth Experience blog. December 19, 2016.
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DiMattia, Michelle. “Refecting on LEAD.” The Booth Experience blog. October 12, 2016. http://theboothexp.com/
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Fang, Austin. “Random Walk-ing through the World!” The Booth Experience blog. October 7, 2016.
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“Fun Times at Booth.” The Booth Experience student blog. November 26, 2010.
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Harris, Melissa. “University of Chicago’s New Booth School Dean, Sunil Kumar, Taking a Broad View.”
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“Losing the Blues.” The Economist. October 6, 2012. www.economist.com/node/21564204
Lydon, Carrie. “Advice From Your Interviewers.” Booth Insider admissions blog. February 13, 2013.
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Lyndon, Carrie. “Waitlist Update.” Booth Insider admissions blog. December 20, 2011.
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“Madhav Rajan Appointed Dean of University of Chicago Booth School of Business.” UChicago News. March 8,
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“Maestro Named 2015 New Venture Challenge Finals Winner.” Chicago Booth News. May 29, 2015.
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“MBA: What is TNDC.” Politics, society, economy, MBA, career: Booth/IIT grad – x-Banker/Consultant/Techie blog.
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Middleton, Diana. “Chicago Names New Business School Dean.” Wall Street Journal. July 28, 2010.
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“Prof. Douglas J. Skinner Named Interim Dean at Chicago Booth.” UChicago News. August 3, 2017. https://news.uchicago.edu/article/2016/08/03/prof-douglas-j-skinner-named-interim-dean-chicago-booth
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Spicer, Darren. “Ski Trip! More Than Snow and Mountains.” The Booth Experience student blog. January 27, 2015.
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“Top 100 U.S. MBA Programs of 2012.” Poets&Quants. December 7, 2012. http://poetsandquants.com/2012/12/07/
the-top-100-u-s-mba-programs-of-2012
“Top 100 U.S. MBA Programs of 2013.” Poets&Quants. December 2, 2013. http://poetsandquants.com/2013/12/02/
poetsquants-top-100-u-s-mba-programs-of-2013
“Top 100 U.S. MBA Programs of 2014.” Poets&Quants. November 26, 2014. http://poetsandquants.com/2014/11/
26/poetsquants-2014-best-business-school-ranking
“Top 100 U.S. MBA Programs of 2015.” Poets&Quants. November 18, 2015. http://poetsandquants.com/2015/11/
18/harvard-business-school-tops-new-2015-poetsquants-mba-ranking
“Top 100 U.S. MBA Programs of 2016.” Poets&Quants. November 21, 2016 http://poetsandquants.com/2016/11/
21/2016-poetsquants-mba-ranking/
This is Chicago GSB. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, 2007.
University of Chicago Booth School of Business Admissions Chat. Booth Admissions Team. July 22, 2010.
www.chicagobooth.edu/fulltime/chat/transcript/2010-07-22.aspx
University of Chicago Booth School of Business Admissions Chat. Booth Admissions Team. August 17, 2010.
www.chicagobooth.edu/fulltime/chat/transcript/2010-08-17.aspx
University of Chicago Booth School of Business Admissions Chat. Booth Admissions Team. September 7, 2010.
www.chicagobooth.edu/fulltime/chat/transcript/2010-09-07.aspx
University of Chicago Booth School of Business Admissions Chat. Booth Admissions Team. October 12, 2010.
www.chicagobooth.edu/fulltime/chat/transcript/2010-10-12.aspx
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 University of Chicago Booth School of Business Admissions Chat. Booth Admissions Team. January 13, 2011.
www.chicagobooth.edu/fulltime/chat/transcript/2011-01-13.aspx
University of Chicago Booth School of Business Admissions Chat. Booth Admissions Team. February 15, 2011.
www.chicagobooth.edu/fulltime/chat/transcript/2011-02-15.aspx
University of Chicago Booth School of Business Admissions Chat. Booth Admissions Team. February 23, 2011.
www.chicagobooth.edu/fulltime/chat/transcript/2011-02-23.aspx
University of Chicago Booth School of Business Admissions Chat. Booth Admissions Team. August 10, 2011.
www.chicagobooth.edu/fulltime/chat/transcript/2011-08-10.aspx
University of Chicago Booth School of Business Admissions Chat. Booth Admissions Team. October 20, 2011.
www.chicagobooth.edu/fulltime/chat/transcript/2011-10-20.aspx
University of Chicago Booth School of Business Admissions Chat. Booth Admissions Team.
January 12, 2012. www.chicagobooth.edu/fulltime/chat/transcript/2012-01-12.aspx
University of Chicago Booth School of Business Admissions Chat. Booth Admissions Team. January 31, 2012.
www.chicagobooth.edu/fulltime/chat/transcript/2012-01-31.aspx
University of Chicago Booth School of Business Admissions Chat. Booth Admissions Team.
April 25, 2012. www.chicagobooth.edu/fulltime/chat/transcript/2012-04-25.aspx
University of Chicago Booth School of Business Admissions Chat. Booth Admissions Team. November 19, 2014.
www.chicagobooth.edu/programs/full-time/admissions/events/online-chats/2014-11-19
“Which MBA? Global Full-Time MBA Ranking 2010.” The Economist. September 30, 2010. www.economist.com/
whichmba
“Which MBA? 2011 Full-Time MBA Ranking.” The Economist. October 13, 2011. www.economist.com/whichmba/
full-time-mba-ranking
“Which MBA? 2012 Full-Time MBA Ranking.” The Economist. October 4, 2012. www.economist.com/whichmba/
full-time-mba-ranking
“Which MBA? 2013 Full-Time MBA Ranking.” The Economist. October 12, 2013. www.economist.com/whichmba/
full-time-mba-ranking?term_node_tid_depth=All
“Which MBA? 2014 Full-Time MBA Ranking.” The Economist. October 11, 2014. www.economist.com/whichmba/
full-time-mba-ranking?year=2014&term_node_tid_depth=All
“Which MBA? 2015 Full-Time MBA Ranking.” The Economist. October 15, 2015. www.economist.com/whichmba/
full-time-mba-ranking?year=2015
“Which MBA? 2016 Full-Time MBA Ranking.” The Economist. October 13, 2016. www.economist.com/whichmba/
full-time-mba-ranking?year=2016
“Which MBA? 2017 Full-Time MBA Ranking.” The Economist. October 27, 2017. www.economist.com/whichmba/
full- time-mba-ranking?year=2017
Williams, Chloe. “LEAD at Booth.” The Booth Experience student blog. November 2, 2011.
http://boothstudents.blogspot.com/2011/11/lead-at-booth.html
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Web Sites
2011 University of Chicago Booth School of Business Management Conference: www.chicagobooth.edu/mc/2011/
2012 University of Chicago Booth School of Business Management Conference: www.chicagobooth.edu/mc/2012/
The Booth Experience, student blog: http://theboothexp.com
Booth Insider: Full-Time MBA Admissions Blog (University of Chicago Booth School of Business Admissions
Committee blog): http://blogs.chicagobooth.edu/boothinsider/
Booth Partners: http://student.chicagobooth.edu/group/chipart/moving.php
Chicago Booth International House: http://ihouse.uchicago.edu/admissions_fellowships/rates_terms/
Chicago Booth Partners: www.chicagoboothpartners.com
Corporate Finance Group: http://cfgbooth.com
Corporate Management and Strategy Group: http://cmsg.weebly.com
Hyde Park Angels: www.hydeparkangels.com
London Banking Summit: www.londonbankingsummit.com
Myron Scholes Global Markets Forum: http://research.chicagobooth.edu/igm/events/speaker-series/
Regents Park High Rise Apartment Pricing: http://regentsparkchicago.com/apartments-and-pricing.php
The Rose Report: Rose Martinelli on Full-Time MBA Admissions (University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Admissions Committee blog): http://blogs.chicagobooth.edu/rosereport
Trulia: Real Estate Overview, Chicago, Illinois: www.trulia.com/real_estate/Chicago-Illinois/
University of Chicago Booth School of Business: www.chicagobooth.edu
University of Chicago Booth School of Business Admissions Committee chat transcripts:
www.chicagobooth.edu/fulltime/chat/
University of Chicago Booth School of Business Entrepreneurship Conferences: www.chicagobooth.edu/entrepreneurship/conferences/other.aspx
University of Chicago Booth School of Business Chicago Booth Corporate Finance Group: http://cfgbooth.com
University of Chicago Booth International Business Group: http://student.chicagobooth.edu/group/ibg/
University of Chicago Booth Marketing Conference: http://student.chicagobooth.edu/group/mktg/
conference.htm
University of Chicago Booth School of Business Partners Group: http://student.chicagobooth.edu/group/
chipart/
University of Chicago Graduate Student Housing: http://rs.uchicago.edu/graduate_housing/index.shtml
University of Chicago International House: http://ihouse.uchicago.edu
Venture Capital Investment Competition: www.vcic.org
Interviews and Other
Administration Member, Chicago Booth. Personal Interview. May 17, 2011.
Administration Member, Chicago Booth. Personal Interview. May 25, 2011.
90
mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Ahlm, Kurt, Associate Dean for Student Recruitment and Admissions. Personal Interview. March 23, 2011.
Ancona, Tom. Assistant Director, Hyde Park Angels. Personal Interview. March 18, 2011.
Associate Director of Marketing, Communications and External Relations, Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship
and Innovation. Email Communication. April 19, 2013.
Association of Graduate Admissions Consultants. Tour of Chicago Booth/Meeting with Associate Dean for
Student Recruitment and Admissions Rose Martinelli. June 18, 2008.
Chicago Booth Alumna. Personal Interview. April 29, 2013.
Chicago Booth Alumnus. Personal Interview. June 16, 2008.
Chicago Booth First-Year Student. Email Communication. May 1, 2013.
Chicago Booth First-Year Student. Personal Interview. June 3, 2008.
Chicago Booth First-Year Student. Personal Interview. May 15, 2010.
Chicago Booth First-Year Student. Personal Interview. May 17, 2011.
Chicago Booth First-Year Student. Personal Interview. May 24, 2011.
Chicago Booth First-Year Student. Personal Interview. March 31, 2012.
Chicago Booth First-Year Student. Personal Interview. April 16, 2012.
Chicago Booth First-Year Student. Personal Interview. March 22, 2013.
Chicago Booth First-Year Student. Personal Interview. May 17, 2014.
Chicago Booth Partner. Personal Interview. May 26, 2011.
Chicago Booth Second-Year Student. Personal Interview. March 29, 2009.
Chicago Booth Second-Year Student. Personal Interview. March 31, 2009.
Chicago Booth Second-Year Student. Personal Interview. March 9, 2010.
Chicago Booth Second-Year Student. Personal Interview. March 11, 2010.
Chicago Booth Second-Year Student. Personal Interview. March 11, 2010.
Chicago Booth Second-Year Student. Personal Interview. May 15, 2010.
Chicago Booth Second-Year Student. Personal Interview. June 1, 2010.
Chicago Booth Second-Year Student. Personal Interview. March 11, 2011.
Chicago Booth Second-Year Student. Personal Interview. March 19, 2011.
Chicago Booth Second-Year Student. Personal Interview. May 16, 2011.
Chicago Booth Second-Year Student. Personal Interview. January 3, 2012.
Chicago Booth Second-Year Student. Personal Interview. March 1, 2012.
Chicago Booth Second-Year Student. Personal Interview. March 7, 2012.
Chicago Booth Second-Year Student. Personal Interview. April 2, 2012.
Chicago Booth Second-Year Student. Personal Interview. November 13, 2013.
Co-Chair, Chicago Booth Business Solutions Group. Personal Interview. May 16, 2011.
Co-chair, Chicago Booth Ski and Snowboard Trip. Email Communication. April 24, 2013.
Darragh, Linda L. Director of Entrepreneurship Programs, Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship. Personal
Interview. June 3, 2010.
Darragh, Linda L. Director of Entrepreneurship Programs, Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship. Personal
Interview. March 18, 2011.
91
mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Darragh, Linda L. Director of Entrepreneurship Programs, Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship. Personal
Interview. April 1, 2012.
Farrar, Janice. Associate Director of Relationship Management, Career Services. University of Chicago Booth
School of Business. Personal Interview. March 17, 2011.
Kreft, Linda. Senior Account Manager, Accent and Travel MBA. Personal Interview. March 11, 2011.
Martinelli, Rose. Chicago Booth Associate Dean for Student Recruitment and Admissions. Personal Interview.
May 8, 2009. mbaMission Student Survey. Online via SurveryMonkey.com. December 5, 2012.
Member, Chicago Booth Dean’s Student Admissions Committee. Personal Interview. May 25, 2011.
Middlebrooks, Arthur, Executive Director, Kilts Center for Marketing. Personal Interview. April 5, 2011.
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mbaMission Insider’s Guide: Booth School of Business · 2018–2019 Headed to b-school?
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