Professor Laura Born is no stranger to Booth. An alumna of the MBA Class of 1991, she spent years in investment banking before returning to the school as a faculty member. Now, she is teaching Cases in Financial Management (BUSN 35210) in Spring Quarter from 8:30-11:30am on Tuesdays at Harper Center. Drawing from her extensive career at JP Morgan, Born brings finance to life in the classroom, making complex financial concepts accessible and practical for students from all backgrounds.
Timothy Reichmann sat down with Professor Born to discuss her teaching philosophy, career journey, and perspectives on Booth’s MBA experience. They also talked about her favorite travel destinations, books, and even her must-have personal belongings.
Read on for insights from one of Booth’s most engaging finance professors.
You teach Cases in Financial Management. Why do students want to take your course?
They want to take the class because it takes what they’ve learned in finance and makes it very practical. Whether students come to us through a finance background or are starting from scratch as career switchers, they are attracted to it. It’s the practical application of finance. I used to teach Corporation Finance and so I had to teach the theory, and I prefer teaching this case-based class where I can really add so much more value from my background in finance when I worked at JP Morgan. Hopefully when I do cases with students, the cases kind of jump to life. And that’s where students find value in my class – the real-life application of finance and my background giving me the ability to bring these cases to life.
What’s one class at Booth you’d recommend that students take.
There’s so many that it’s hard to say. Honestly, I think Negotiations and the Strategy classes are important. I also love Interpersonal Dynamics and Nick Epley’s Designing a Good Life. Doing your MBA is a time when you can grow as a person in a risk-free environment. You can try things out and your job’s not on the line. And I think I like to think of these two years for all of you as like an incubator stage of your life. I’m really trying to convince my daughter to do an MBA not because she needs a skill set that she doesn’t have to be successful in her job, but I really want for her what I had where I got this two year break in my 20s to try out some things and honestly learn more about myself, about how I came across to other people. I just think that is awesome. And I really would ask students, you know, especially our first years to really put themselves out there because once you get into work, you kind of get into “I gotta conform to the culture of the company”. And hopefully, you can still be yourself, but I do think this is a risk-free environment to try new things: styles, classes, subjects, etc. in every way, so be vulnerable. Do it.
When you’re not in Chicago, what are a couple of your favorite places to travel and why?
Big Sky, Montana and Austin, Texas. People say you go to Big Sky for the skiing, and you stay for the summer, because the summers are actually better than the winter so I go to ski a couple of weeks every year and then in the summer I’ll usually spend six or seven weeks there in July and August – it’s so pretty. And I can do most of my work there and attend board meetings. I wanted a place where my kids who are growing up in the north shore of Chicago could intersect with nature, and with a lack of schedules because their life was pretty hectic. And so Big Sky is really a special place and now my daughter has moved to Montana and I’m pretty sure my son would also move there if he could.
What’s one of your favorite things about teaching at Booth?
The students. Interacting with students and trying to distill complicated things into understandable chunks, I can see light bulbs going off and it’s also fun to also hear about them and their lives. We have such a diverse, interesting student body and everyone has a cool journey that got them here. And you know, I love hearing about everybody’s different journeys. So that’s number one for sure.
What’s a favorite restaurant to go to in Chicago?
Le colonial which is a French-Vietnamese restaurant on the Gold Coast is one of my favorites, often a birthday spot for me. Yeah, you’ll see me there once a year for sure. I love the vibe there.
What are some of your hobbies?
I love downhill skiing. Even though I have blown out both knees I am still back on my skis. I also love hiking. I’m really into nature. I love spotting wildlife like bears and fox and elk in their settings. I love going to international destinations I’ve never been to and I’m all about knowing the people in the culture as they really are. I was in Cambodia in January which was very eye-opening to just see geo-politics play out there because the US has tried to put money into Cambodia but not been terribly successful. Now China is making big investments there and I find that whole dynamic to be fascinating. I was an econ and political science major, and I focused on international politics so that’s always been a big draw for me. I love traveling and that goes back to my dad: I watched him travel all over the world because he was aligned with the energy business. He went to Saudi Arabia and Venezuela and places like that, and he would come home with little trinkets for me, and it really spurred my interest in travel. I’m very, very fortunate that I’m able to do a lot of amazing things and travel to interesting places and learn about the world outside the US.
Who is a Booth professor whose research you really admire?
I would say both Steve Kaplan and Rob Vishny. I love Kaplan’s work on private equity. I also love behavioral finance. You know, behavioral finance wins Nobel Prizes these days. I also love Devin Pope and all his work around gender and other biases that are out there. He provides hope in his research on how once you get to know others as people it can help you strip away your biases. This is one of my big, big things in business is getting to know the people that I’m working with or negotiating against – I just think it brings a human element and you get to better solutions instead of “us vs. them”.
What’s a favorite book of yours?
I just read David Copperfield by Charles Dickens and it took me a long time. It enlightened me on the struggle of folks who are so much less fortunate than I was. I grew up with very modest means, but nothing like he did. I love how the author, Charles Dickens, is a parallel to David Copperfield. I thought he did an incredible job and how he wrote the characters to speak in their class dialects was particularly great. I felt like it really brought to life the struggles, it’s got a little bit everything in there in terms of challenging upbringings. I just finished it, and it took me forever for sure. But it was worth it.
Tell me about an obstacle you had to overcome in your career that you’re proud of having surmounted
Yeah, entering investment banking in 1991. Entering Wall Street as a woman in that era was so challenging – immediately pigeonholed into “what I looked like matters more than what I said or thought”. I was in a sales function at Bear Stearns (I worked there during their heyday before they failed). It was quite a go-go culture of party hard, work hard, and, you know, you eat what you kill so everyone’s on their own, but you can do well if you work hard. The bias against women was strong on Wall Street. And so, dealing with that, I would say is like my number one challenge that I overcame, and making sure that people heard what I had to say and the value I could add as opposed to looking at my face or whatever. I do think it’s a lot better now. Not all women feel that way, but I’m telling you, it’s a lot better, a lot better than it used to be. So, just overcoming that and being able to be relatively successful in the time that I was there, despite those biases – I found being female in investment banking on the client side to ultimately be to my advantage. I landed in Chicago and was covering mostly Midwest companies. I found the clients told you more as a woman – they felt more comfortable or more willing to share and when you get more information about your companies, you can usually come up with better ideas and win the business. I found that they were more open with me and that served us an advantage, but I worked in all the male-centric industries, red meats, truck maker, chemicals, etc. I was the rare woman covering the client, so they don’t forget you. I was always the only one in the room whenever I did anything for most of those years, so finding enlightened men to work with was one of the things I sought out.
You’ve been a professor here for a while and you also did your MBA here in the 90s. In what way do you think the MBA program has changed over the years?
Yeah, I think the good news is we have such a higher variety of classes and pathways. Of course, this has always been an ala carte program. It was when I was here, but the pathways when I was here felt much more like a PhD lite pathway in that it was very theory focused and like, I had to take linear programming. It was so irrelevant to what I was doing. I felt that the curriculum was more narrow, less practical, and you know, had some things that just weren’t applicable to everyone. I would say the additional years of work experience that are now required generally makes for richer student bodies. So that’s good, I think in general, you just have lived more life before you show up and so I think that’s really helpful. I think we did not travel the way you guys did. Part of that was because we were younger and had less resources. And, you know, with technology, and the globalization of the world travel on a real basis has gotten cheaper, not more expensive, so it just wasn’t as accessible to us. You know, the big thing would be like a ski trip at Spring Break. I think some of the negatives, with technology, and with everyone living away from Hyde Park, the sense of community… I mean, I literally used to come to the equivalent of Harper every day of the week, and our classes were three times a week or two times a week. The community of physical interaction was so much stronger. And it’s just different. And I know you guys are all in the same buildings, you know, in the loop and there’s a lot of connectivity through slack or texting or group chats or whatever it is. And it’s just to say, I’m from that generation where I really feel in person engagement is important. And so, I think you are interconnected more via technology, but you talk less and I think real in person conversations are where the bonds are strongest.
That’s just how I feel about life. And so, that’s my negative perspective, but that isn’t just a Booth issue.
Is there any advice or recommendations you have for Booth students more broadly?
Oh, gosh. The advice I would say is take some academic risks in your choices of classes. Network like crazy not because that person can help you get a job but because there’s so many amazing students to get to know from so many backgrounds, allow your mind to be open to those backgrounds and hear their points of view and take advantage of the city which I am from, and love and think is amazing. You know, better than New York for sure. Okay, little bit of rivalry there. And you know, I think one of the best cities in the US to visit when you consider all aspects. Though it is rough to weather the winters here. And I also recommend if you work here, after school, to allocate your travel budget to winter month vacations, because in the summer, you can just walk to the lake and have a great time. I think that’s a critical strategic move as you know, allocate vacation days and travel budgets to winter months when you live here so that you can get out enough to not go crazy.
This is a random question, but what are the three things you would keep if you could only keep three of your belongings.
Oh my god. That’s such a good question. My Fitbit. I love my Fitbit. My glasses because I cannot see without them. So those are really important. I gotta come up with something fun too: probably a corkscrew, so I can open wine bottles.
