The visionary MBA: how Chicago Booth prepares you for the future of business

As the economy, financial markets and technology all undergo rapid transformation in the UK and globally, many professionals are looking for a post-graduate degree that will help them envisage the future of business and respond confidently to change.

An MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business will do all this and more, by encouraging you to be an innovative, informed and decisive business leader.

Career success in financial services and other sectors is increasingly dependent on your ability to think like an entrepreneur and stay focused on long-term success.

Whether you run your own business or work within a larger organisation, as a Chicago Booth MBA student you will develop a more entrepreneurial and adaptable mindset.

The Booth curriculum instills an evidence-based, analytical approach to anticipating industry shifts, empowering you to use the best available data and research to navigate evolving marketplaces and make visionary 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 programmes give you the freedom to create an experience to meet your unique career goals. In our Full-Time, Evening and Weekend programmes, 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 programme, 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 programme, 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 UK – 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, so you can make the kind of pioneering impact you want in the world after you graduate.

Current alumnus Erez Mathan is one of those visionaries. Despite already having a thriving career in larger organisations, Mathan says Booth's MBA programme helped him gain the foundation he needed to pursue a career in a rapidly evolving fintech start-up.

Mathan is now COO of London-based start-up GoCardless, where he manages the risk, compliance, legal, finance, human resources and customer support teams. He says his Booth MBA degree has helped him become a more innovative leader because he now has the ability to leverage data to make decisions, rather than relying on intuition or gut instinct.

The Booth programme gave him the framework to think more critically and more boldly. “We’re trying to question a lot of the things we’re doing and making sure that we don't just settle for best practices from the past,” he says.

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 programme, 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 analysing 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 programmes, 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, analyse business ideas more creatively, and position themselves to make a positive impact every day of their career.