The innovative MBA: how Chicago Booth helps you unlock new ideas for career success

As the economy, financial markets and technology all undergo rapid change in the U.S. and globally, many American professionals are looking for a post-graduate degree that will advance their careers, build their confidence, and unlock new innovations.

An MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business will do all this and more, by encouraging you to take risks, debate topical issues, and blaze your own path.

Career success in financial services and other sectors is increasingly dependent on your ability to innovate – and the Booth MBA is specifically designed to help you challenge the status quo.

Spirited debate, for example, is encouraged throughout the program as a way to test and refine the best ideas. The classroom environment of free thinking and open inquiry makes you dig deeper and discover more, so you can shape the future of business.

As a Chicago Booth MBA student, you will develop new techniques to lead by example, navigate evolving marketplaces, and make bold yet deeply informed decisions.

Chicago Booth offers four MBA programmes tailored to suit your career needs and your stage in life, all taught by the same award-winning faculty: Full-Time, Evening, and Weekend (offered in Chicago), and the Executive MBA programme, which is available in Chicago and at our London and Hong Kong campuses.

All Chicago Booth MBA degree programs give you the freedom to create an experience to meet your unique career goals. In our Full-Time, Evening and Weekend programs, you can explore a range of ‘concentrations’ – from entrepreneurship to marketing analytics – to further deepen skills in the fields that interest you the most. In our Executive MBA program, geared toward senior executives with 10-plus years’ experience, you’ll get a more focused education on the general management skills needed to elevate your career to the next level.

Regardless of the program, location or electives you choose, the Booth MBA will give you a global and multidisciplinary perspective, which will broaden and deepen your understanding of management and business best practices.

Once enrolled at Booth, you’ll become part of a diverse and collaborative community. You’ll interact regularly with classmates from incredibly varied backgrounds and numerous job functions, working in industries as wide-ranging as finance and pharmaceuticals.

It’s also a community that extends far beyond Chicago and the U.S. – it transcends continents, cultures and customs. When put into case study groups, for example, you might be working alongside a banker from Argentina or someone who’s just been posted to Nigeria or India.

There truly are no boundaries at Chicago Booth. You’ll be surrounded by people who will give you new perspectives on business and on life, and who share your passion for learning. You’ll help one another to think differently and bring new insights to your work.

As a Chicago Booth student, you’ll be encouraged to be a visionary and a free thinker, so you can make the kind of pioneering impact you want in the world after you graduate.

Current alumnus Joanne Chen is one of those free thinkers. The Booth MBA degree helped Chen, who began her career in engineering and then investment banking, to realize her goal of making a career change into the dynamic world of venture capital.

While enrolled in the full-time program in Chicago she joined the Hyde Park Angel network in order to gain hands-on investing experience. Chen is now a partner at Bay Area VC firm Foundation Capital and works alongside some of Silicon Valley’s most innovative new technology companies.

“The most important thing that attracts me to venture capital is the ability to pick people, ideas, business models that would change the world in a very significant way,” Chen says. “I enjoy working hard and trying to understand difficult concepts. Booth has a strong emphasis on really driving that kind of academic rigor, and I really appreciated that.”

The Chicago Booth MBA experience is not just about a diploma; at its heart it’s all about people with different individual talents coming together to solve problems in order to make things better for their companies, their customers, and the world at large.

You’ll find the same approach on our campuses. We have more than 200 faculty members (in a dozen research and learning centers), who bring real-world experience as consultants, expert witnesses, board members, entrepreneurs or even investment fund managers into their teaching.

But you won’t just be listening to our professors – don’t expect them to feed you information or give you rules to follow. They will support you throughout the program, share insights, encourage debate, champion intellectual freedom, and ask you to examine your own assumptions.

You’ll be asking yourself questions that will uncover ideas and facts, leading you to new solutions and even more importantly, leading you to uncover what values you want to stand for in your work and your life.

This type of free and open classroom debate will give you the confidence to excel in any situation, anywhere, with anyone, throughout your career. And it will help you on the job when it comes to analyzing problems, generating insights, and implementing creative solutions.

Your Chicago Booth experience will encompass so much more than what goes on in the classroom. Through dozens of student groups focused around a wide variety of professional and personal interests, at events, in daily conversations with professors, alumni, and students from all programs, you’ll constantly be establishing new relationships and building new networks as you explore your career, your interests, and your ideas about business management.

And when you graduate you become part of a welcoming global network of more than 51,000 passionate alumni, who you can to turn to for advice and support throughout your career.

Through its interconnected community of alumni, students and faculty, Chicago Booth brings together bold, inquisitive professionals across the world who are able to think more strategically, analyze business ideas more creatively, and position themselves to make a positive impact every day of their career.