Got this email from Manhattan GMAT......(they keep spamming me w emails even after I am long done with their courses... 
)MBAMission - Interview w Booth School of Business Adcom (Rose Martinelli:) - PART IAdmissions Interview: Chicago BoothmbaMission: Chicago-Booth is stereotyped as a finance school, is that fair? What should the school be known for that it’s not now known for?
Rose Martinelli: Chicago Booth is much more than a finance school, it is an economic powerhouse, and critical thinking is at the core of everything we do. Economics underpins most business functions, including finance, strategy, marketing, and entrepreneurship. While we have been known globally as a great financial institution because of the number of faculty who were awarded Nobel prizes for their innovations in the financial markets, Booth offers so much more.
Our entrepreneurship program, which has the Polsky Center at its foundation, is excellent and unique in its focus on both the practitioner and the investor side. The curriculum combines academic and experiential learning together to enhance the learning experience. Marketing is another area where we have been recognized for the work of our faculty in quantitative and behavioral marketing research. We recently received the AC Nielsen database which will allow for tremendous insight into consumer behavior. For students interested in pursuing a career in marketing, our combination of analytical and behavioral marketing coursework provides unparalleled preparation for future challenges.
Booth’s new concentration, Analytic Management, provides the same type of rigor and depth focused on data-driven analysis as our analytic finance concentration.. Our emphasis on and excellence in quantitative and statistical analysis for decision making is unmatched. These analytic methods are applied to a wide range of industries and functions such as understanding advertising and consumer behavior; analyzing risk and incorporating uncertainty; identifying profitable customers and determining optimal pricing policies; accelerating product innovation; optimizing supply chains; identifying the drivers of financial performance; and allocating resources.
Our focus is on building critical thinking skills that utilize the many lenses of business. We’re great on teaching technical skills, and making sure those technical skills are applicable and practical. At the same time, we’re equally focused on helping students to develop their executive presence and leadership profile. It’s a packaged deal.
mbaMission: You mentioned marketing and entrepreneurship. Is there a strategy to grow these fields or do these things just happen organically?
RM: I think it’s been a combination of both. Typically programs grow when student interest grows. It also grows when there’s faculty interest, and there is a lot of research going on. Over the past 10 years there has been a huge amount of growth in entrepreneurship due to those dual interests.
Whereas the marketing group has always been a smaller group, but has gained enormous amounts of energy and prestige in the last 5 years with the launch of the Kilts Center -- with a lot more groundbreaking research taking place behavioral and analytical marketing.
The growth of our programs has always been linked to student and faculty research interests. Once there is enough of a groundswell, the administration also provides additional resources to strengthen those areas, and that’s what’s been happening here at Chicago Booth.
mbaMission: Chicago Booth was fortunate to receive quite an impressive donation of $200 million from David Booth, who the school is now named for. I’m curious what the immediate impact of the gift is?
RM: This remarkable gift came at the right time, just as the market began to tumble, which helped us remain shielded from some of those enormous pressures that occur when endowments fall. This gift has given us an opportunity to focus on strengthening the core values of Chicago, which is truly the power of inquiry. Instead of these dollars being put into scholarship funds, they’re being put into strengthening the overall value proposition of the school to ensure that we have the best faculty, we recruit and matriculate the best students, and that those students find great opportunities facilitated by the support of our career services. It’s more about strengthening what was already strong, and ensuring that the Booth legacy continues long into the future.
The other interesting thing about the donation was that it was a partnership distribution, rather than a lump sum gift. Therefore as a partner in the fund we’ll receive annual distributions.
mbaMission: A couple questions about the financial crisis. I’m curious from an academic perspective, how lessons from the financial crises have been taught over the last couple months.
RM: Chicago is well known for our notion of “challenging everything” and to every idea there’s always a counter approach. There are free market and behavioral finance faculty researching and teaching side-by-side, so, we were talking a lot about this long before the markets started to spiral downward. Now, the conversations have shifted to identifying solutions. Our faculty have been very active with the administration on both sides analyzing and doing research on how best to structure a way out of this situation. I graduated from my executive MBA just a few weeks ago, and the classroom had ongoing discussions about what was happening in the news. Faculty were not only debating these ideas publicly on campus, but bringing it into the classroom as well.
mbaMission: In the light of the downturn will there be any changes in the qualities the school is seeking in candidates?
RM: No. We are focused on selecting students who have records of achievement. And to me that can be seen in a number of ways: how well someone has done academically, how well he/she has navigated their career and leveraged opportunities. The second thing that we look at is a student’s level of self-awareness and their ability to engage and be intellectually involved in something that’s perhaps not so comfortable. Being able to get in there and debate, challenge each other, and be challenged are very central qualities to good leadership. While it is important to communicate ideas effectively, it’s more about what have they done, where are they going, and how this is all linked together, rather than elegant/eloquent writing skills. It can be short and sweet and very direct. When you know yourself well, you should know exactly what direction you are headed and what you need to be successful.
mbaMission: Chicago’s first essay is a little bit less direct compared to other schools with respect to short and long-term goals. What are you expecting in this regard?
RM: For me, the question as to why an MBA is important is much more relevant than exactly where you’re going since goals change. The thought process that brought you to this place in your career is what interests me. I’m looking for a sense of direction and knowing what your needs are. If you have very refined goals I would say that’s great. But for the vast majority of people, if you really pressed them, goals were often created recently and typically just for the application. And, since the whole point of an MBA experience is to explore, expand and develop a new understanding and awareness of one’s abilities and passions, I don’t get hung up on goals. I am, however, very interested in path, plan, and knowing one’s self.
mbaMission: When you make decisions, do you frequently consult career services?
RM: This is an academic institution, so we’re here to educate. And we’re here to facilitate development of future leaders who can be successful in their job search. So, one of the things that we need to establish is whether a person is reasonable in terms of where they hope to go and how much we as an institution can help them along the way. Sometimes we can’t, and there are other schools that are a better fit. So, yes, if I have concerns about path, I’ll run it by our career services team.
Tune in next week for the second half of mbaMission's interview with Rose Martinelli of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
23 May 2009, 10:48
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