As a student pursuing private equity at Booth, I could not imagine a better education and introduction to this hard-to-enter industry than the PE/VC lab class at Booth. The depth and detail in which we have explored every aspect of PE has been invaluable to my future career and how I think about investment opportunities. I sat down to discuss the growth of private equity at Chicago Booth with adjunct professor Chris McGowan, who is a 23-year PE industry veteran and also a faculty advisor and an Entrepreneur-in-Residence for the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
One aspect of Booth that keeps surprising me day after day is the incredible access to speakers on campus. On any given day, it is not unusual to find multiple top executives, entrepreneurs, and investors from all corners of the business world on campus sharing their experience and advice with students.
As a first year MBA student, it’s easy to get swept away by singling in on consulting or investment banking recruiting. However, for me, as the recruiting process kicked into high gear at the end of October, the Net Impact 2017 Conference was a refreshing opportunity for me to join like-minded individuals dedicated to arriving at careers focused in social impact.
A dozen of us Booth students took the trip to Atlanta, GA, the site of this year’s conference, to learn about our “Path to Purpose,” this year’s theme for the annual social impact event. If the conference provided the “path,” the Booth Net Impact co-chairs were our mountain guides.
Over the past several years, Booth has invested significantly in many areas of concentration outside of the traditional finance field. The Kilts Center for Marketing is one of the great beneficiaries of that effort. In addition to sponsoring research and strengthening the marketing curriculum, Kilts invites top industry leaders to campus to share their experience with Booth students firsthand. Cognizant of the growing interest in the technology industry, the Kilts Center for Marketing invited an industry powerhouse that epitomizes marketing success and leadership in the technology industry: Gary Briggs, the Chief Marketing Officer at Facebook.
Over the course of last year, a team of our fellow Boothies took on a $1 billion challenge against several other universities to see which school could best invest the theoretical sum of money in commercial real estate. The Booth team’s unique strategy beat out the rest of the Real Confidence University Challenge participants and earned them the $30,000 grand prize (in real money). The Booth team returned 23.86% on their portfolio over the course of the year and cleared the runner up of 32 teams by 4.80%. Hear what a couple of the team members have to say about their winning two-point approach and how Booth set them up for success.
As a first year MBA student, it’s easy to get swept away by singling in on consulting or investment banking recruiting. However, for me, as the recruiting process kicked into high gear at the end of October, the Net Impact 2017 Conference was a refreshing opportunity for me to join like-minded individuals dedicated to arriving at careers focused in social impact.
