Hi all!
Hope you’ve had a great week! This week at TBE, we bring you the third installment in our Day in the Life video series. Today we follow around Alicia, a second-year student from Lake Tahoe, California, as she embraces a day filled with a morning workout, classes, meetings, and a Valentine’s night Chicago Bulls game with her husband. Check out Alicia’s Day in the Life here!
This week, as I was reflecting on what we could blog about, I went back over our last few entries. I realized we were showing you a lot about the serious (and important!) side of Booth – recruiting, academics, etc. Here at Booth, we fully embrace working hard…but we like to have a good time too! So I want to take you on a tour of “After Hours” Booth by sharing what I did with friends last week. Come along, and hopefully you’ll get a sense of how we balance work with fun here at Booth!
Tina
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THURSDAY
6pm – Happy Hour at the Purple Pig (River North)
The weekend starts with drinks and tapas-style snacks at one of my favorite Chicago establishments, the Purple Pig. Tonight, the occasion is a group reunion. Abby, Eileen, Lindsay and I worked together in Data-Driven Marketing (my favorite class at Booth) last year, and became good friends through the experience. Our schedules are very different this year, but I love the opportunity to catch up with the girls and talk about the classes we are planning to bid on for our final quarter. We even make plans to form a team for Entrepreneurial Selling with Professor Wortmann if we all get into the class!
8pm – Rockefeller Leadership Challenge Reunion (South Loop)
I head home by 8pm to get my apartment ready for guests. Tonight, I’m hosting my Leadership Challenge Team’s get together. Our team of 10 competed together for the Rockefeller cohort in the fall of our 1st year during the Leadership Challenge competition, and we’ve made an effort to stay in touch ever since. Every quarter, one of us hosts a get together to catch up. It’s a great group because we do so many different things at school that we rarely see one another – it’s really nice seeing them and using them to bounce off different ideas and reflect on the Booth experience.
11pm –LaSalle Power Company (River North)
Every Thursday night, hundreds of Booth students gather at a bar in downtown Chicago to catch up with old friends, meet new ones, and generally unwind! This week we were at LaSalle Power Company, a bar in the busy River North neighborhood.
FRIDAY
5pm – LPF (Liquidity Preference Function) at Houlihan’s (River North)
Most Friday afternoons, Booth hosts LPF, an event normally held at Harper Center. It’s open to the entire Booth community – a chance for students, partners, faculty, and administratorsto mingle over beverages and steaming appetizers. From time to time, LPF is hosted “off-campus” – as it was this week. LPFs also usually have a theme – this week’s was a Mentor-Mentee LPF. I went to meet up with my mentee, year Liz, a first year from Miami, to see how her quarter’s been so far.
8pm – Potluck Dinner at Dan’s (Gold Coast)
Tonight, my friend Dan, who I met on my Random Walk trip to Nicaragua, is hosting a potluck at his apartment in the Gold Coast. Dan is busy working on his company for the New Venture Challenge, and tonight I meet the rest of his team for the first time. We get to know each other over Dan’s slow-cooked brisket, Jamie’s mac n’ cheese, my Thai fried rice, and much more.
11pm – House Party (Gold Coast)
Booth students live all over the city in a variety of housing options. Tonight, four students who live in the Gold Coast are throwing a party at their big spacious house, and have invited a couple hundred of their closest friends! Great chance to catch up with people and kick off the weekend together.
SATURDAY
7pm – Dinner at Chizakaya (Lincoln Park)
A few friends and I decide we are in the mood for Japanese, so we headed over to Chizakaya in Lincoln Park for some Japanese pub food. You should definitely try the Wagayu cheek skewers and chicken skin skewers (for the more adventurous).
11pm – Barrelhouse Flat (Lincoln Park)
After dinner, we hop down the street to check out Barrelhouse Flat, a bar offering late night food and specialty cocktails. We spend the evening people watching and mixing in with the Lincoln Park crowd.
SUNDAY
7pm – Dinner at Flaco’s Tacos (South Loop)
One of my best friends from before school, Meghan, comes down from Kellogg, where she is a second year. We grab dinner at Flaco’s Tacos right around the corner from where I live and catch up over tacos and burritos.
9pm – Eli Young Band concert at Joe’s (Gold Coast)
Afterwards, it’s off to see a country concert with Meghan (who is a big country fan!). Joe’s on Weed is a great venue that Booth has used in the past for off-campus get-togethers. It also doubles as an intimate concert venue. The band was lively and the people-watching of the crowd was quite entertaining. We had a great time!
MONDAY
6pm – Dinner at Avec (West Loop)
Tonight I catch up with a Booth friend from one of my old class groups at Avec, one of my favorite restaurants in Chicago. They don’t take reservations, but luckily we can get there early enough to snag a couple of seats at the bar and enjoy their inventive gastropub fare (something I will truly miss about Chicago!).
TUESDAY
7:30pm – Cardio Dance class with CWiB (West Loop)
CWiB stands for Chicago Women in Business – it’s a club that brings together Booth’s women and through which I’ve met many of my good friends. CWiB hosts social events regularly, and tonight, a dozen ladies meet at the Lou Conte dance studio in the West Loop for a cardio dance class that gets our hearts pumping as we learn a dance routine.
WEDNESDAY
7pm – Ski Trip Reunion (Gold Coast)
The 5 of us who roomed together on the Aspen ski trip had been trying to get together for weeks to catch up and reminisce about that great week. Tonight, we meet up at Dana’s studio apartment in the Gold Coast, order take-out, and watch Aspen Extreme (a brilliant movie from the early 90’s that will make you want to quit your job and move to Aspen to become a ski instructor too!) to kick up some Aspen nostalgia.
So as you can see, we stay pretty busy both on campus and off!
What are you looking forward to doing in Chicago and at Booth “After Hours”? We’d love to hear your comments and ideas below.
