I’ve always been passionate about Entrepreneurship and three years ago I started a US-based tech-enabled hospitality company that provides furnished hotel style apartments and private residences primarily to business travelers. My choice to attend business school was rooted in my desire to complement my engineering background with solid business fundamentals and management skills. As an entrepreneur, developing informed intuition is a crucial skill for decision making. Prior to business school, my entrepreneurial spirit had predominantly been carried by intuition and I knew I lacked the frameworks. I was faced with two options – learn via practice or learn via theory.
The Chicago Booth School of business offered me the opportunity to simultaneously pursue my entrepreneurial journey while enjoying a world class business education. Not only did Booth allow me to pursue entrepreneurship thanks to its very flexible curriculum but it also provided me with a wealth of resources to support that journey. The carefully crafted programming at the Polsky Center—including the New Venture Challenge—and the readily available Booth faculty are a couple of the entrepreneurial resources I have been fortunate enough to access while at Booth.
Beyond providing a favorable environment for aspiring and active entrepreneurs, the MBA program at Booth is distinctively characterized by a strong sense of intellectual curiosity and community. Whether in person or virtually, discussions with my incredibly brilliant peers in the classroom have greatly contributed to my learning experience. To add, Chicago Booth has an amazingly collaborative and supportive community.
One of my most memorable anecdotes exemplifying the character of the people at Booth occurred during my application process, several months before I could officially be counted as a member of the Booth family. A then second year, that I had cold emailed and whose schedule I now know was certainly very busy at the time, gladly had an hour-long conversation with me about the program and offered continuous assistance throughout the process. For me, the benevolence of this second year towards a then prospective student, signaled what I could expect as a student at Booth. It is equally worth mentioning that this collaborative culture carries on beyond the duration of the program and is witnessed within the alumni community.
At Booth, every student is a master of their experience – even entrepreneurs. As an aspiring or active entrepreneur at Booth, it is likely that at times you will question whether entrepreneurship is the right path for you and whether the gamble is worth taking – especially when the quasi totality of your friends follows more “guaranteed” professional paths. When in doubt, it could be useful to remember that your time at the Chicago Booth School of Business is your time to experiment and take risks. In the worst of cases, you will walk away with great lessons, lifelong relationships and a globally recognized business education I bet will open a few doors for you. Hence, aim for your dreams. Booth puts you in the right place to do so.
