MBA Podcaster has launched a new Day in the Life Series. We’re traveling to business schools across the country and around the world to shadow current students, meet with deans, admissions directors and others to bring you an in-depth perspective of life on-campus. Schools include UCLA Anderson, Wharton, Insead and many others. Visit our website at mbapodcaster.com to listen to any of our day in the life shows and see pictures and videos from campus. This month we bring you University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business.

“Hi, my name is Jen LaBelle, this is an environment where students are really attracted to us because they want to engage.” “There is about a five day stretch when it was below zero every day and windy; that was pretty unbearable.” “I think that the thing that differentiates Chicago in lots of ways is students’ ability to think critically.” “Don’t worry about getting in, getting in is a product or fruit of doing great work.” “One more week. How’re we feeling?” I’m Janet Nakano for MBA Podcaster and this is a day in the life of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

“I was up until about two o’clock in the morning last night working on some homework for a group project.” That’s Jen LaBelle, a first year full-time MBA student, “So I let myself sleep in a little bit later than usual and I got up around eight. Usually I get up a little bit earlier to make it down to campus. I find that just getting down here even if I don’t have anything scheduled starts my day and gets me productive if there’s other things that I need to do. I get a little distracted at home. Chicago is a great town so it’s very easy to get distracted if you’re not physically at school. So I came in and the first thing that I did which is what I do every morning is go to the ‘Winter Garden’.” The ‘Winter Garden’ isn’t actually a garden, it’s the atrium of the GSB building where students can gather at scattered sofa chairs and small tables. The area above the garden is enclosed in glass so it sort of feels like you’re in a gigantic green house. “Someone once called it giant martini glasses.” That’s Alan Friedman, Communications Director. He’s talking about the roof which really does look like four standing martini glasses. “They’re open on the top, it’s not flat so the rain goes through right down those pillars all the way to the bottom to the parking garage which is below the classroom level, there’s a parking garage and the glass veins up at the top are heated so if there’s snow or ice in the winter it melts and the water runs all the way down the columns.”

Architect Rafael Violy designed the GSB building also known as the Harper Center. The business school is just a few miles south of downtown Chicago and is housed here in this one building on the University of Chicago campus. The Harper Center is a stark contrast with the rest of the university that was built in 1890 with the style referred to as collegiate gothic. The business school established nine years later in 1898 just recently moved into this new building, a six story glass and steel structure that’s full of modern comforts like full-length lockers to fit business attire, break out rooms, student lounges and even a limestone fireplace. Again Alan Friedman, “The MBA student’s life of today is different than it was years ago where they would come to class and then leave the school. Now they come in the morning and they stay all day. It’s not uncommon for a student to be here eight hours or ten hours or even more during the day here in the building. That’s why there’s a full service cafeteria that’s open for breakfast and lunch and dinner and group study rooms are available to the students all the time the building is open.”

It’s ten o’clock in the morning at Chicago GSB and Jen has agree to give me a campus tour. Our first off, the famed ‘Winter Garden’, “A lot of people will sit out here and try to do work and sometimes they’re successful, a lot of times they’re not because it’s a very social place and it can get loud at lunchtime.” Sitting at one of the tables in the Winter Garden are a couple of Jen’s friends, Jessica and Muntzy. “Hello ladies. This is Janet from MBA Podcaster so I was telling her how the Winter Gardens is the place to see and be seen.” “The Winter Garden is absolutely where we spend all of our time when we’re and we’re generally not productive but we try to be. If you really want to be productive you have to go to the study room. This is where we all meet up, hang out, eat lunch, catch up.” What are you studying for? “I’m trying to work on a paper that’s due tomorrow. Trying being the operative word.” How about you? “I’m actually working on a project for I’m interning at a venture capital firm this quarter and I’m working on an investment memorandum for them right now, giving some updates.” Okay, so you’re already starting to work for them? “It’s actually one of the classes at the GSB is a Private Equity, Venture Capital Lab where you intern during the spring quarter. So I’m interning with them this quarter and then going to a bank for the summer.”

The GSB matriculates about 550 students each year. With such a large student body, Jen says the first quarter is a crucial time to meet as many people as you can, “One of the biggest piece of advice that I give to incoming students is even if you’re not a social person or you don’t necessarily enjoy going to parties every night or going to events every night that if you put forth that effort in the fall, it makes it a whole lot easier going forward because you need to know as many people as possible when everybody’s in that stage of getting to know everybody and willing to shake hands and willing to kind of tell their life stories. It just sets yourself up so that then you can kind of take a breather from the social scene if you want to later on and not feel like you’re missing out on anything.

Jen LaBelle, did her undergraduate studies in marketing and business at the University of Florida. She worked in sales and marketing at Ford Motor Company for six years before coming to Chicago. She says that one of the main reasons she choose this program was because of it’s flexible curriculum, “I really wanted to tailor my MBA experience to what I wanted it to be and I found that some other schools were a little bit more rigid and if you wanted something very structured then that would be perfect for you but I wanted something a little bit more fluid that I could decide what I wanted to learn and when I wanted to learn it throughout the process.” This flexible curriculum is unique to Chicago GSB. There isn’t a cohort based core curriculum common to other MBA programs, instead there is only one mandatory class in the first year called, Leadership Effectiveness and Development, a course that focuses on business soft skills. The rest is pretty much up to you. You choose the nine courses that will fulfill degree requirements and 11 electives. Deputy Dean, Stacy Cole says this curricular flexibility is based on Chicago’s free choice centric philosophy, “So the students have a tremendous amount of control over their educational experience which I think is empowering and important because this free choice centric is based on the fact that we’re bringing in adults who have experience in the work force, who understand their life’s goals and our job is to help them get there but not to dictate how they get there. There are requirements: all students have to take a class in accounting, one statistics and one in micro economics in order to graduate. But the flavor of the course is up to them. Whether they take it in their first quarter, second, or final quarter is up to them. There are requirements for degrees; if you want to be finance concentrator, you have to take a certain number of courses in that area, but which courses and when is totally your choosing. And I think there’s a few things that help students in terms of that process. One is obviously they feel like they have more control but the second is that they’re able to better position themselves for their internships because they know fairly early in the winter what area they’re going to be working on in the summer and they can choose classes that can help them deepen their knowledge so that they’re ready to shine in the summer and then the second year just keep going and intensifying your knowledge.”

Choosing courses to prepare for a summer internship is exactly what Jen decided to do, “I have class this afternoon from 1:30 to 4:30 and that’s Data Driven Marketing and it’s a class that I’m taking that I thought would really help out with my internship with American Express. A lot of the customer information that they have is in a huge database and so there’s a lot of different analysis that happen on that so I wanted to take a class that would prepare me for the summer so I was very happy that that happened this quarter.” Jen says she plans to pursue a career in brand management after graduation. With a background already in marketing, she said she looked into other MBA programs that focuses more heavily on marketing but graduated toward Chicago for its quantitative strengths. Julie Morton is Associate Dean for Career Services, “I think Chicago certainly has a reputation for being very strong in finance in the faculty in finance and the coursework that students have access to in finance is pretty incredible. To me from a career perspective, I think the thing that really differentiates Chicago in lots of ways is students’ ability to think critically. I think our students are very, very good at asking the whys and really pushing for data and data analysis to understand what’s going on with an issue. I think sort of stereotypically that gets translated into finance, I think that skill set is a hugely valuable skill set, almost truly regardless of discipline. I mean that’s why consulting firms love to come here, I mean that’s the skill that McKenzie and BSG and Bane and Booz and AT Kearney really value here. It’s certainly the skill that the banks value here but it’s also the skills that Kraft talks about when they come on-campus, that they really enjoy our student’s marketing prowess because of that underlying ability to think critically about problems and not just kind of go yes that makes sense and not just take things from this is how I experience it but really look at the data to figure out the bigger picture.”

Finance and economics are key areas at Chicago but Dean Cole says the second most popular concentration here is entrepreneurship, “I think what is different about our entrepreneurship curriculum is that it leverages the strength in finance so that not only are you thinking about how to start a business but when you find yourself with lots of cash to invest, how do you choose amongst different investors. So entrepreneurship at most institutions is about starting a business, when do you bring in the lawyers, when do you actually hire somebody for HR, how do you get a patent, all of those are really critical issues for starting a business and we cover that content. But we also have courses in entrepreneurial finance, commercializing innovation and many courses that help students who are not necessarily the entrepreneur learn how to make wiser investment decisions and really be better prepared and positioned to play a key role within bringing a new venture to market.”

Dean Cole says the students at Chicago have an image of being intellectual, driven and competitive. And while they do strive for success, she says the community is what defines the culture. “This is an environment where students are really attracted to us because they want to engage. When I’m in the classroom my goal is to ask provocative questions, to put material on the table that really pushes students to think and the students see their job as pushing me back in a similar way. To us, we think that’s incredibly exciting, it’s this level of engagement and debate and dialogue that really defines who we are so it attracts a certain type of student to us and a certain type of faculty member who wants to be here. But a very important part of our community is engagement not within the classroom but with one another. So we have a tremendous amount of second year investment in first years. So you would expect that the school would have staff to support to students and I think Chicago hands down has the best career services area and tremendous support for student life but in some sense students should expect that everywhere. What I think that they’re constantly surprised by is the strength of the community and how much students want to work together to help one another be successful.”

I did my undergraduate in Boston so I’m kind of used to it but it was about a five day stretch that it was below zero and windy. It was horrible.” “It was not very pleasant to be outside for more than point two seconds.” Jen’s friends, Jessica and Muntzy are giving me the low down on Chicago’s weather. “That’s the nice thing about being in the Winter Garden is it could be snowing outside but if it’s sunny you still get the sunshine so you don’t feel like most people do in the winter when they go inside and they don’t see the light of day.” Where do you live? Close by? “I live downtown, it’s like 15 minutes on the Metro, it’s not bad.” “It’s not too bad, yeah I live on the north side up in Lincoln Park and I actually drive and I take Lakeshore and it’s pretty easy in the morning, it’s never more than 20 minutes. Sometimes at night if you go at the wrong time it can be more like 40 but I can’t complain and I love my neighborhood.” So does everyone have a car here? Do you need a car? “No, you definitely don’t need a car. We have a couple of friends who live even further north than Jess and I do and they either make friends with people who have cars or they rely on public transportation. Public transportation in Chicago, it’s not going to be as great as it is in New York or other places but if you know where you need to be and you plan ahead of time you can definitely get to where you need to go.”

Jessica and Muntzy do need to get back to studying so Jen and I decide to continue with the campus tour. “This is our front entrance area where people will come in and perspective students will come in and have meetings with the Admissions Office and a lot of times at lunch time there will be current first or second year students who will come up here and meet a group of perspective students and take them on a tour of the building and also bring them to class with them in the afternoon. So as a perspective student you get the opportunity to come in, tour the building, talk to a current student, have lunch at the café and then also go to a class so that’s kind of a neat experience to able to get to see what it’s like on-campus.”

What about mentors? Do you have a mentor? “I do have a mentor. There is a formal mentor process here at the GSB, we actually, the first years just signed up to be mentors to the incoming class and it’s completely voluntary so you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. Then there’s a website that incoming students can go on to and they can either just randomly assign themselves a mentor or they can search for something specific. So I searched for, I wanted a female mentor because I wanted to kind of establish that bond with a woman who’d kind of gone through the same things that I was about to go through and I also wanted someone who was going to do brand management or had a background in brand management and so Ashley Eagan actually came up and so she was one of my mentors here on-campus. Then I actually have already been assigned two mentees from the incoming class so I’ve been in contact with them via email just making sure that I get to know them and answer any of their questions and then when they come on-campus I’ll meet with them, we’ll go to lunch and I’ll just be available to them, for whatever they need.”

“This is our café.” Oh wow. “Yeah. Notice you have burgers, fries, hot dogs, anything like that. There’s sushi everyday and there’s a brick oven pizza and then any snack you could ever want as well.” Do you usually eat here? “I usually do. I usually do. After doing it for three months it gets a little difficult to find variety but it’s a lot easier. About two blocks north on-campus there’s another pizza place and an Asian restaurant and a bakery so if you have a little bit of extra time and you want to you can walk over and get something there. But usually it’s just grabbing a quick bite to eat here.” It’s lunch time and Jen says she has a student council meeting to go to, then a class until 4:30 so I will catch up with her again later in the day.

The full-time program has three rounds of deadline in October, January and March. Students are admitted for the fall quarter. “The most successful candidates always have a track record of success,” that’s Rose Martinelli, Associate Dean for Student Recruitment and Admissions, “Personal, professional, academic. They know how to leverage their resources and opportunities in their career and they know themselves pretty well as a person. They’re very self aware and they have a plan. Not necessarily that that plan won’t change but at this vantage point they kind of know where they’re going and what they need to get there. We believe everybody comes from different backgrounds and has different aspirations and because of that we want you to design your own curriculum so you have to be very, very engaged. We’re a mid-sized program so we’re 550 students. We believe not only curriculum flexibility but in flexibility of the learning and teaching as well so our faculty teach the best way that they find to teach that type of educational subject matter. And so students have the opportunity to choose faculty who may choose to teach differently one course from the next. So two financial accountings may be taught very differently so that flexibility is there for students to take a look at. We also don’t believe in fixing students to teams. We allow teams to involve in each course so it’s very team based but it’s not constrained by our choice but by student choice. Lot’s of student opportunities for leadership development but again everything is at the desire and engagement of the student, it’s not fixed for you. So in many ways people call the GSB for grown-ups, it’s the MBA for grown-ups because you come in knowing yourself, knowing what you need and you guide your education.”

I know that a lot of candidates have questions about what makes a good essay so can you talk about what you look for in an essay? What makes a successful one? I think the most important part is that a person understands themselves so I always ask students to spend some time doing a self assessment. Professionally, personally, relationally, even in terms of community and really think back over a period of five to ten years about the highlights and lowlights of their life, basically on a continuum and then really think back to what were the lessons learned, almost in bullet format. So if you know who you are, if you know you like people or you prefer the back office. If you know your strengths and your skill set in the developmental areas you can really speak quite frankly to the things that you need to be successful. If you haven’t done the self assessment I can always tell because I’ll always flip a question at you very quickly at an interview or in the essay question when their just lacking the depth. One of the most troubling or most difficult part of the essay are that they are short. We allow you 1,000 words or 1,500 words to cram your entire life into, I mean so I think the most difficult part is learning to talk about the things that are really relevant to why you’re getting a MBA. So you have to sort through, I’ve done x, y, and z and maybe I can only talk about x and maybe z, y is really important but I’m going to have to just gloss this over because I know they’re going to see my resume and they’ll see that. But to pick and choose from your life and your career, what’s relevant for a MBA committee to read versus kind of the litany of your resume, that’s the tough part.”

You probably travel a lot to different areas to talk to perspective students. “Absolutely.” What’s the most common question do that you get from them? “Depends on the part of the world they are from. Throughout Asia it’s what’s the average GMAT? In India that’s the same thing. But a lot of people really break down the question not so much about what the school is like but how do I get in. I would really ask listeners to think about asking the questions, what’s it really like to be a student there and ask more questions about what the experience is all about and the faculty and the education and not just be focused on how to get in. Because if you know enough about the institution you can be very clear about fit and match for yourself and we’ll understand that. So spend more time focusing on getting to know the institution and talking to students. Don’t worry about getting in, getting in is a product or a fruit of doing great work and great research upfront.”

“Entire MBA community it is a pleasure to welcome you here.” While I wait for Jen to get out of class I find out there’s a special guest speaker on-campus this afternoon, the right honorable Baroness, Valerie Amos, formally the Leader of the House of Lords in the British Parliament. She’ll be discussing the future of our diverse world. “I believe that one of the biggest challenges facing out world today is going to be how we learn how we live together. Not just as countries but as communities, be it ethnic communities or religious communities and also as individuals. We have major security and environmental challenges but these can be compounded by fear, suspicion of other cultures, other ethnicities and other religions.” Two student groups helped to organize today’s events, the African American MBA Association and the Chicago African Business Group. The Baroness discussed diversity issues in the UK and her personal struggles as an African woman. John Lawrence Etame from the Chicago African Business Group says he can relate to her experiences, “I’m originally from Cameron and as we all know the African continent is still developing in a sense and the main thing I got from her was regardless of how much walls you have out there so long as you’re willing to work at it and work along with people you will be able to overcome these walls or barriers and I think it’s very important you know because if we don’t have that kind of thought process then how are we going to make the world better?”

It’s now 4:30 and Jen is just getting out of class, “Class was good, it was our final class for Data Driven Marketing so he gave out our final project which is a take home final and it’s going to be kind of like a consulting project so that’s a little exciting but also apprehensive because you’re not supposed to get help from anybody else, it’s just you and a lot of the work that we’ve done so far has been group work. So we’re trying to reconcile how we’re going to work alone rather than as a group on the final project.”

Jen says her next stop for the evening is a meeting for Chicago GSB Leadership, Development Program called LEAD, “The number one thing that’s taking a lot of my time right now is that I’m a LEAD facilitator. LEAD is Leadership Effectiveness and Development and it’s a course that all the first year students take when they first come on-campus. It deals mainly with interpersonal skills, talking a lot about conflict management, personality types, leadership in general, different theories and philosophies and it’s taught by second years so I’ll be going into my second year and when I come back on-campus in the fall I’ll be teaching that class. And right now we’re developing the modules, the different classrooms and we’re coming up with the activities, we’re actually teaching to the part-time students up at our downtown campus so they get a chance to take lead as well. So that’s taking a lot of my time just because it’s a ton of work. It’s instant gratification though because it’s something that you get to work on you get to see the fruits of your labor right away.”

Jeffery Anderson is Associate Dean of Leadership Development, he says 80-100 students apply each year to teach the lead program. “Each winter there’s actually an application process so people who have been through the first quarter lead the program and have a desire to serve that role themselves, apply and go through a rather rigorous process of demonstrating their own presentations and teaching skills. The opportunity for us to observe them actually operating in a group setting and putting into practice many of the skills that they would have learned during their first quarter lead class. Then we sit down as a team, I have four people on my staff and we evaluate each of those people and then select 40 from all of the applicants.”

How successful has the program been? It’s been implemented for what? “17 years. I judge its success by a number of different constituent groups that I have heard from and their feedback to me. So I’ve heard a lot back from employers who say that the Chicago GSB students just present themselves differently and more effectively in the interview process. They also tell me they come to them more prepared to begin dealing in presentations with clients and seem to operate more effectively from the beginning in group settings in terms of cooperating with their colleagues. So we hear a lot of very good reinforcing feedback from employers. I also hear from students during their two year process here who come back from interviews or come back from an internship and talk about how much the things that they learned in the lead program, how much they benefited them. In some cases it really helped them land that job in what otherwise might have been a challenging environment for them. Then I have heard a lot unsolicited from alumni, some of who you know were in the first class of lead, 17 years ago but who want to reach out and tell someone about how those lessons have stuck with them for a very long time and how they use those skills everyday and how important they have been.”

Alright one more week. How are you feeling? With more week to go, one of the things that I wanted to say is that one of the objectives and one of the challenges that we all said in the beginning was to sort of make sure we created an environment that was increasingly engaging and interactive with the students and I will tell you’ve all just done a miraculous job. From your interactions with your squads do you have any particular comments that you think would be helpful? Jen.” “One of the things that I loved hearing when I talked to students that I’ve had personal involvement with as far as coaching sessions and things like that is when they can relate and have an ah ha moment at work so a lot of them will come back and they will be like ‘Yeah I talked to my boss and I used process listening and he’s never really taken my suggestions before and so that really helped me’ or ‘I was dealing with a really difficult co-worker and I bumped instead of spiked and it was amazing to see what happened’ and that stuff is like how can you use that everyday at work and so I would just encourage our students to just continue to do that and to have those moments and to be able to turn back to some of the key take aways that they had from the program.”

Jen still has some work to get done tonight and prepare for those upcoming finals but she says she’ll leave some time to enjoy the warm Chicago night, “This being Tuesday night I’m sure that there’s something going on. The Risking Gaming Club might be having a poker match or something along those lines so I’ll probably just wait and see what’s buzzing around. It’s funny, if you just check your phone or check your email there will be some sort of an event, either dinner at someone’s house or let’s go grab a glass of wine here. Now that the weather has changed a lot of people are going to Cubs games or a lot of the bars and restaurants around town put out their chairs all outside so it’s really great to go grab a beer, grab whatever and kind of hang out outside and enjoy the nice weather.”

From Chicago, I’m Janet Nakano for MBA Podcaster.

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