The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business is one of the top MBA programs in the world, boasting several Nobel laureates and holding a spot among the elite M7. Yet despite Booth’s strong reputation, many applicants are surprised when they learn about all its MBA program has to offer. Here are three common misconceptions about Chicago Booth…
1. “It’s just a finance school.”
Chicago Booth has inarguably become synonymous with finance. Its reputation in this space is well deserved; Booth’s finance faculty members, which include Nobel winner Eugene Fama and Fischer Black Prize winner Raghuram Rajan, have made significant contributions to the field. The program even claims on its site, “There is no better business school in the world to study finance than Booth.” But that does not mean that the program should be known only for finance. Booth’s 2024 employment report reveals that 32.9% of its graduates that year entered the financial services industry, which means that approximately two-thirds of the class accepted positions in other industries, including consulting, technology, healthcare, consumer products, energy, and real estate. In fact, consulting is such a popular career path among Booth graduates that 33.8% of the Class of 2024 (nearly 150 MBAs) accepted consulting jobs, making the school one of the top programs for consulting placements.
Another sometimes overlooked focus at Booth is entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is actually the most popular concentration at Booth, which makes sense, given the school’s experiential lab courses and the robust resources offered by the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Via the school’s Entrepreneurs-In-Residence program, successful Chicago-based entrepreneurs serve as mentors to Booth students. And the school’s popular New Venture Challenge is a top start-up accelerator, having helped launch more than 370 start-ups over the past two decades.
The takeaway here is that if you are interested in finance, Booth should definitely be on your list, but if you are not, you should not count the school out. It is far more than just a finance school.
2. “Having so much flexibility means there’s no structure.”
Chicago Booth has a reputation as the most flexible business school, with only one course that every student is required to take (called LEAD). Indeed, Booth students have more freedom than students at other programs do in that they are not required to pick a concentration (though most do), and they can choose their courses, electives, and professors right away in the first quarter of the program. You can design your course load to match your recruiting timeline. And you can take up to six courses outside Booth at other University of Chicago schools.
Most students find this flexibility empowering and use it to challenge themselves with classes in subjects beyond ones they already know well, or they mix and match courses to fit their needs as career changers. However, this reputation for flexibility can be misleading. Booth’s curriculum has more structure than many expect. For example, in the full-time MBA program, students must choose one course from three foundation areas—Financial Accounting, Microeconomics, and Statistics—and at least one course from seven of eight categories, which include Marketing, Decisions, Society, and Strategy. But what is different about Booth is that within these areas, students can opt to take a basic course, such as “Business Statistics,” or a more challenging one to satisfy their foundational requirements, such as “Machine Learning” or “Big Data.” As a result, two different first-year students could have very different course schedules. Rest assured that Booth has track suggestions, career advising resources, and second-year students to guide you.
Perhaps where most applicants misjudge Booth is thinking that the program’s flexibility applies only to course selection, when in fact, it extends to the entire Booth experience: which student clubs you join, the teams you form, where you live, and so on. The school does not assign you to a learning team to collaborate with a preselected group of fellow students, you do not take multiple classes with the same cohort of students, and you are not required to live on campus. Booth truly gives each student the freedom to make their own choices and believes that this freedom best prepares students to navigate future ambiguity and complexity.
The takeaway here is that even though flexibility is a core component of the Booth MBA experience, this does not mean that you will miss out on opportunities or have zero guidance or support. Think of the program’s flexibility as an opportunity to explore.
3. “The community must not be cohesive because students aren’t always on campus.”
As mentioned earlier, Chicago Booth does not dictate where its students live. Although the campus is located in a diverse neighborhood called Hyde Park, just south of downtown Chicago, most students opt to live in the vibrant downtown area known as “The Loop.” In fact, a recent Booth graduate shared with mbaMission that most students live in one of three apartment buildings right next to each other. This off-campus proximity creates an incredible social scene, with regular dinners at Chicago’s many eateries and popular weekly TNDC (Thursday Night Drinking Club) events at local bars. In addition, Booth students who live in The Loop are with an easy train ride of Hyde Park and enjoy all the benefits of urban living, including modern apartments and convenient access to restaurants, shopping, museums, and Chicago landmarks.
On campus at Booth, everything is housed within just one building, the Charles M. Harper Center—the heart of which is the Rothman Winter Garden. This six-story atrium serves as a gathering space for events and a common area for students, faculty, and staff to connect throughout the day. Fun fact: the Harper Center is home to an impressive contemporary art collection of 800 works by almost 200 global artists.
While Booth students are free to choose from a variety of student clubs and activities, the school facilitates regular social interaction through weekly events for all types of students and lifestyles. Further afield, Boothies (yes, they call themselves that) rave about the two annual ski trips and student-organized Random Walk trips abroad.
The takeaway here is that even though Booth’s community is not centralized on campus, its students nevertheless enjoy a thriving social scene. By comparison, Booth does not have a completely campus-centric culture like that of its neighbor Northwestern Kellogg, nor a dispersed metropolitan culture like that of Columbia Business School.
With respect to career opportunities, curriculum offerings, and community, Booth offers a plethora of options for its students to explore. The question is whether you would relish those choices or feel daunted by them.
I hope this post has given you a better understanding of the Chicago Booth MBA experience. For even more in-depth information on the school, download a free copy of the mbaMission Insider’s Guide to the Booth School of Business or listen to episode 15 of The mbaMission Podcast, “5 Minutes on Chicago Booth,” wherever you enjoy your favorite shows.
