36% of Chicago Booth MBA students are international, with 54 different nationalities represented in the current class. Chicago Booth’s alumni network tops 50,000 members, spread across 115 different countries worldwide. 25% of Chicago Booth faculty are from outside the US.
Last year, nearly 200 multinational companies visited Chicago Booth to interview students for jobs. Out of the 2016 class, 100% of full-time international MBAs received job offers within three months of graduation. Top MBA employers include the ‘big three’ global management consultancies – McKinsey, Bain, and BCG – as well as Amazon and Google.
We spoke to four international ‘Boothies’ to find out why they chose Chicago Booth, and why others should do the same.
Victoria Yunger, MBA ‘18
Victoria started her own fashion blog, and worked in marketing and e-commerce in her native Israel, before relocating to the US with her husband for an MBA at Chicago Booth. She wants to stay in the online space after her MBA.
I applied and got admitted to a number of top US business schools alongside my husband, Oren. For us, the challenge was choosing a unique MBA program in which we could both prosper, separately and jointly.
We needed innovation, flexibility, big city life, and to feel constantly challenged, in a good way. Chicago Booth stood out as the entire package, wrapped in a bow of an amazing Nobel laureate faculty and a tight-knit community that makes us forget that our real home is over 6,000 miles away!
In no other time of my life have I been more of a ‘doer’ than I am right now. This is what Chicago Booth is all about. The Chicago Booth MBA is instrumental in realizing my ambitions as it’s wide-ranging yet flexible, enabling the kind of growth that best fits each student’s background. I already feel empowered!
Aviv Shalgi, MBA ‘18
A former engineer, Aviv worked for a mobile advertising platform in Tel Aviv prior to his MBA. He’s learning more about entrepreneurship at Chicago Booth, and is considering applying for jobs at VC firms after graduation.
I chose Chicago Booth for the people. I approached over 25 students and alumni at each of my target business schools. Everybody I reached out to from Chicago Booth replied within a few days and suggested they schedule a call with me and help me figure out if Booth was the right place for me. This sense of collaboration isn’t something you see every day with such busy people. This was exactly what I was looking for in my MBA!
So far, Chicago Booth has opened my eyes to so many new ways of thinking and analyzing situations that I never knew existed. In today’s world, many companies are founded, raising early-stage funding, without deeply researching their target market, thus wasting time and money running in the wrong direction. I think my best experience so far had been an entrepreneurship class with Professor Mark Tebbe, a successful entrepreneur, who unlike many classes in most business schools, doesn’t teach how to build a company, but rather how to identify that the market need you’re trying to answer is there.
Vincent Chevalier, MBA ‘11
Vincent relocated from France for an MBA at Chicago Booth. Today, he runs his own digital advertising agency in Silicon Valley.
I wanted to gain an international perspective. I wanted something which would give me the opportunity to work in the US, and the rest of the world. I saw the MBA as a kind of insurance against economic crises. Once you have an MBA, whatever the situation, you can still move to another area and flourish.
I applied for NYU Stern and Johnson at Cornell, but Chicago Booth was by far the best option. Once I got the offer, there was no hesitation. I wanted a technical foundation in finance, entrepreneurship, and to strengthen my business toolkit. Chicago Booth’s focus on the actionable tools – the hard skills - that you can apply in the real business world, was especially appealing.
With an MBA from Chicago Booth, you can find a job pretty much wherever you want. You meet fascinating people from different backgrounds, and extend your network internationally.
The Chicago Booth MBA is an international program in an international school with a global footprint. Chicago Booth has Executive MBA campuses outside the US, in Hong Kong and London. EMBA students can rotate across the international campuses.
Adja Diakite, Chicago Booth Executive MBA ‘18
Adja is an EMBA student, currently studying at Chicago Booth’s London campus. Originally from Mali, West Africa, Adja has worked for Deutsche Bank in London for the past five years. She wants to develop her entrepreneurial skills, with a view to giving back to her native country.
I’m passionate about Africa. I was lucky to be educated in France but, before leaving Africa, I made a promise to my math teacher as a young teenage girl. I promised that if I was successful I would return home to support and develop Africa for the younger generations of the future. I still hold this promise dear and I’m beginning to think increasingly about how I can use the skills I’ve acquired from my MBA to help Africa realize its potential.
I know my Chicago Booth MBA will help me reach my ambitions because I can already feel the curriculum and faculty guidance filtering into everyday business decisions. The school calls it ‘The Chicago Approach.’ It has effectively given me a framework to follow when problem solving, to make sense of complex data and to create ideas that really make a difference. It has completely changed my mindset, even if it has required late night study sessions with my classmates!
London is a great location for global work. I’ll aim to be based in London but with a strong connection to other locations – the US, Asia, and Africa - because of the strong network of fellow students and alumni that I’ve developed through my time at Chicago Booth.
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