Monday, November 24, 2008

An exciting rerun - BW 2008 MBA rankings!



Last week, the excitement about the BusinessWeek rankings peaked as we watched the live release of the results in the student lounge at the Harper Center – of course, the room erupted in cheers when the verdict was out! After the David Booth gift, it was a nice "one-two" end to our week.

Dean Snyder in his classic understated style sent out this email to the student body:

Chicago Booth has been ranked as No.1 in Businessweek’s biennial ranking of full-time MBA programs. In the previous BusinessWeek ranking also, Chicago Booth ranked first.
Since 2001 our policy has been to report MBA rankings from six media: BusinessWeek, the Financial Times, U.S. News & World Report, the Economist, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal. Of the 69 rankings reported since then, 67 are in the top 10.

He also mentioned in this Chicago Maroon article about how its business as usual after the rankings: “Having noted these positives, we strenuously avoid confusing our identity with rankings. So, it’s back to work.”

Although quite a few of us follow the rankings closely, it’s great to see the pragmatic tone that the Chicago Booth management assumes, which keeps us grounded and focuses on what needs to be done. I personally remain convinced that the student and applicant community ultimately benefits from the B-School rankings by different publications, despite the various biases and controversies that plague each release of ranks and I suspect you would agree with me. There is an interesting take on this subject by Business Today (Student Magazine published out of Princeton) in their latest issue.


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Going global over the winter!

Over winter, different teams of Chicago GSB students head out to various destinations across the world to explore career opportunities, establish contact and sometimes, for more worldly reasons (like the powdery snow at Whistler!).

Dubai, LA, Whistler, Hong Kong, London, NYC are just some of the places that we will be heading out over the next 2 months – for more details, you could check out the attached handout (picture files).




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Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Chicago GSB is now Chicago Booth!



On Nov 6th, all members of the GSB community were invited to the Winter Garden for a historic announcement – we’d become Chicago Booth! In honor of the largest gift to any business school, Chicago GSB has been renamed after a business leader who (literally!) used his Chicago experience and connections to build and grow his firm. According to Dean Snyder’s e-mail to students, this gift is “unconditional” – it allows itself to be deployed in whatever way that the school might deem proper to aggressively move forward and capitalize on our current momentum.

There are obvious gains because of this change for us:
1. Higher endowment and financial resources for deployment that will allow us to focus on:

- Building on our strengths of world class faculty

- Additional resources available to build a diverse and accomplished student body

- And anything else to keep the Chicago Booth flag flying high (this is where the “unconditional” clause kicks in!)

2. Stronger brand identity

- From a generic “Graduate School of Business” to “Chicago Booth”

- To make a stronger impact as we kick off our global marketing campaign

All jazz apart, from a personal perspective, it’s an exciting change for all of us studying here – after the event, a small group of us were discussing that this couldn’t have come from a better alumnus: David Booth leveraged Fama’s “Efficient Market Hypotheses” to build his firm, Dimensional Fund Advisors. Over the last 27 years, he has built his firm with the guidance and ideas of various Chicago professors like Merton Miller, Myron Scholes, Abbie Smith, George Constantinides, Jack Gould, Jim Lorie and Marvin Zonis. And of course the fact that his gift comes at a time when the financial markets are at all-time lows, makes it even better.... some of us will miss the good old “GSB” label, but with the school and alumni extending their reach across the world, Chicago Booth looks like a strong and enduring identity that we can build upon.
Needless to say, we are also excited about the new T-shirts going around, new jokes popping up, and of course, new ideas about what this change holds for our future. If you have any questions about this change, please feel free to reach out to us.

Want to discuss this topic some more? Head on over to the Chicago Booth Discussion Forums