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
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
