Admitted to Chicago Booth Class of 2011 Thread

Congratulations everyone!!!

For professional reasons, I doubt I will be going on a Random Walk, so I will try my hardest to attend the R2 Admit Weekend.

Since it seems par for the course for Chicago admits to take a dig at isa's hometown , I will add this: Electricity? Running water first, then electricity. Clean water > Electricity.

For the record, Isa chose to live in the middle of nowhere where cheese comes before running water and lightbulbs, her hometown is actually near an actual city .

LOL. Don't forget the beer. That comes before water and electricity too.

She actually claims to be from the "ghetto" of the richest suburb of DC. I guess that means you actually have to flush the toilet instead of having the butler do it for you.

LOL.

Wait, isa is a girl from da hood?

If by "da hood" you mean the suburbs, then yes

So I'm a fresh addition to the R2 waitlist (lucky me! ) and was wondering if anyone on here has made it off the Booth waitlist in the past (R1 or previous years) and can offer some strategies. We've got until 1 May 2009 to submit additional information.

Thanks in advance!

In at Chicago !!!

I got waitlisted for R1 and now i'm off the waitlist ..

Agold .. you still here ?

I did some serious research, and found a guy for you to PM: Mishari ... I don't reveal my sources tho

I just registered for admit weekend II. I look forward to meeting everyone.

Hey,

Could any of the current students tell us a little about how bidding for classes works? When does it start and how the process works? How competitive is it to get to a coveted class (for example, Meadow)?

Thanks,
Gil

Hi Gil - Rhyme explained it well here: calling-chicago-gsb-applicants-48955-2640.html#p481480

For incoming students, it starts roughly a week or two before classes begin in the fall (after that its usually in the sixth week or so of a given quarter). As for how it works its pretty simple:

* You start with 8000 points.
* You get 2000 points per class you complete.
* You can enter up to five bids for five different courses at any given phase of bidding.
* The 'price' you end up paying is essentially the lowest successful bid, so if there are 60 seats and only 40 people bid on a class, you pay 0 points. If 65 people bid, you'll pay whatever the 61st lowest bid was (the other 60 get the class).
* There are six rounds (phases) of bidding, during the first four you can drop/add without penalties, thereafter, you don't get your points back.
* There are some limitations on which courses you bid on - for instance, you can bid on conflicting courses that meet at the same time, but you can't bid on two identical courses (although you can say 'Give me any section of this course, or any section with this professor). You can't bid on night or weekend courses until phase 3, and part timers can't bid on day courses until phase 3. This essentially ensures that FT students aren't competing with PT students for FT courses, and vica-versa. The only exception to this is if a course is only offered at night or something for whatever reason.

There are some other small nuances as to how the system works, but essentially its as simple as entering in your bids on the courses you want and hoping you get it. You can allocate some or all of your bid points, and can bid as little as 1 point on a class, or pretty much everything you have. The old system was much more complex, so this is generally a LOT easier. The one thing that sometimes happens with this system is that people put in ridiculous bids in Round 1 for classes basically saying 'If its cheap I'll keep it, otherwise I'll drop it and get my points back'. So sometimes you see inexplicably high prices for some courses, which generally results in people dropping the course and it going for a 'normal' price in the subsequent round. I think this is partly people just not thinking through how the bidding process works.

I'm actually a huge fan of the whole bidding process - its worked out great for me - in fact, I've gotten every single class I've wanted in the first phase of bidding every single quarter, no exceptions. Mind you, this doesn't happen to everyone - but there's a clear correlation between those who take the time to look up historical prices, think through their bidding strategies and plan ahead and those who get the courses they want. Some people just load up the webpage the night before the bids are due and put in some random bid for each class. Those people tend not to have the best results, though I'm surprised how often that strategy seems to work out just fine as well. In the end, I think its worth putting in a few hours every quarter to really think about the bids you enter and what you'll take in the future. I've gotten some of the best professors this way: Meadow, Zingales, Schrager, Rock, Thaler, Epley, etc. If I wanted to, I even had enough to get into Waverly Deutsch's courses or other popular profs.

My experience aside, I think it works out pretty well for most people. The process is sort of self selecting - those who want to do finance or PE will pay through the nose to have Kaplan or Meadow or Rock, those who want to do Marketing won't take Kaplan or some other well known prof (if they take the course at all) - instead they'll save their points for the 'hotshots' in marketing - say McGill or Dhar. Those heavy into Econ will pay for Topel or Rayo, while others who don't care about econ will just take it with someone else. And so it goes on down the line for all the subjects. Basically, the system 'self optimizes' such that you can take the best professors in the areas you care about - no matter what areas those are - since you won't take the best in the areas you don't care about. That of course means that you have to plan your points and spread the wealth with a little foresight, but if you put forward the effort, it works out great.

The new system has a few quirks I don't like - in some ways its less flexible, but it works just fine, and its a world easier than the old one.. Also, if you read the above link olive posted, note that I was referring to the old system and how you could arb there, see what was further up a bit for the non-arb discussion:

calling-chicago-gsb-applicants-48955.html?view-post=481013#p481013

Thanks Rhyme and Olive - definitely a lot clearer now! Really appreciate the effort put into these posts!

When you guys submitted the FAFSA, did you use the general University of Chicago school code? I saw two names when I did a search for "University of Chicago":

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO GRADUATE

I'm hoping the second wasn't the GSB (old name).