Second-Year Bucket List

Full-time student life is pretty great. With just five months left until most of us second years re-enter the working world, now is the time to make sure we’re maximizing the precious hours, resources, and opportunities.

Taking inspiration and suggestions from lots of my classmates, I give you my Booth Second-Year Bucket List: an ambitious collection of personal, academic, and professional must-dos before our summer start-dates. 

Because we’re only at Booth once…

1. Attend all rounds of the New Venture and the Social New Venture Challenges. If the next Grubhub or Braintree seems to be in the works, I want to be there to see it and offer them free labor during my month off in August.
2. Use the MBA skillset for good, in as many ways as possible. For me, my priority is supporting the strategic marketing of a children’s advocacy organization I work with through the Board Fellows Program. There are also lots of community and pro-bono consulting projects channeled through student groups to join over the next two quarters.
3. Ask a professor from one of my favorite classes to lunch. It goes without saying that we’ll probably never be so close to this much mental horsepower again. Top of my list would be Harry Davis from Business Policy, Scott Meadow from Commercializing Innovation, and Linda Ginzel from Negotiations (maybe I’ll ask all three!).
4. Transition student group leadership to the first years effectively. Serving as a co-chair of one of the biggest professional groups on campus has been my most significant contribution to Booth this year. Closing that out by being intentional in the selection of and knowledge transfer to the next Management Consulting Group Co-Chairs will hopefully make recruiting even better for the Class of 2021.
5. Attend the new second year Leadership Vision Retreat in Lake Geneva this May. My wish for LOR 2.0 was granted. This is an awesome follow-up to our first-year orientation trip (LOR = Leadership Orientation Retreat; all new students spend three days in Wisconsin when they start Booth every September!). I’m excited to reconnect with the whole class where it all began, as we plan for how to apply two years of learnings to our real-world careers.
6. Solicit a sponsored Boothie (ideally a friend) to give me a consultant’s crash course/refresher in the most useful on-the-job Excel shortcuts, so I’m that much more ready for my first day at work (note: I’m also learning R right now!). Repay said friend in Lakeshore Fitness guest passes, paper editing hours, or home-cooked vegetarian dinners.

Because the rest of UChicago is awesome, too….

1. Take the free UChicago Public Art Walking Tour, led by docents from the Smart Museum.
2. Check out Photograph 51, For Colored Girls, and the Adventures of Augie March with the three-play package at our on-campus Court Theatre.
3. Attend a speaker series or event hosted by each of the other grad programs, like the Law School, Pritzker (the medical school), and the Harris School of Public Policy. Most of their events are open to us, too!
4. Stay in Hyde Park until 8 pm on a Tuesday for cross-school trivia at the Pub (the on-campus bar located 30 walking seconds away from Booth’s Harper Center). Afterward, ask another grad school’s team to hang out with us at the Hyde, the new local speakeasy that I’ve been meaning to try and only opens late.
5. Participate in only-at-UChicago type traditions outside of Harper, like the Folklore Society’s 59th Annual Folk Festival. This one is a big musical event drawing in lots of students, Hyde Park residents, and alumni of the whole university.

Because we’ve got time, just for fun…

1. Skate the Millennium Park Ice Ribbon at least three times this season. After all, we can see it from MPP– the building where many of us Boothies live– and you can Amazon Prime cheap skates in no time (I already did!). 
2. Divvy (bike) to and from campus along the lake throughout May. Pick a day to coordinate other Boothie cyclists to stop for a beach picnic on the way home.
3. Do the circuit of free museum nights. The Art Institute, Aquarium, Planetarium, and Field Museum are all within walking distance from MPP, and each has at least one evening a month when students pay no entry!
4. Use the 11:30-1:30 daily break between classes to target Hyde Park’s best restaurants for long, lingering, well-priced lunches (everything from Obama’s favorite comfort food at Valois to the fancier scene at the Promontory).
5. Combine our summer internship rewards points to plan a warm-weather beach weekend this month, when we can’t take the wind chill anymore.
6. Show my non-native Chicagoan Booth friends bars and restaurants in at least five neighborhoods they’ve never visited, starting with Hopleaf in Andersonville and Uru Swati on Devon.
7. Enter the Hamilton Lottery daily, and take a Booth friend to a midweek 1:30 pm showing if I win.
8. Make the trek to Evanston, try out Kellogg’s Tuesday night festivities, and then host a group of Kellogg friends for our TNDC in the city (TNDC = all Booth students are invited to a Thursday night event at a different Chicago bar each week) .

Fellow Boothies: feel free to borrow, steal, and add to this list. And please comment below with your own end-of-year to-dos before graduation!