Experience during the program

Booth is a "create your own adventure" type business school. There's no cohort structure, and there's tons of freedom when choosing classes. This school is great for those who thrive with this unstructured academic and social approach.

The school gets all the basics right. Career services are good, and classes by and large are good. Banking, consulting, investment management and all the basic career paths are strong here. We also have private equity/venture capital too but it's a little harder to break into.

The one area which was disappointing, and why I could not give it a perfect rating, is the culture of the school. The culture isn't bad, but I do not believe it is as advertised. The school markets itself as a very intellectual, rigorous place. In my experience, there was a lot of platitudes and I never heard anything really interesting or thought-provoking. To the extent this culture exists, it's in the PhD program and academics, Booth's true strength area. The MBA program culture was pretty typical yuppie as far as I could tell.

About professors, classes and curriculum

Booth seems to have a strong presence in analytics, so if that's an area of interest the school is definitely worth checking out.

About job placement process

A lot of people end up having to do a "specialized search", meaning going for companies that do not recruit on campus. If you're looking for traditional big MBA employers like banking, consulting and tech, on-campus is fine. But most corporations, even some very large ones in the Chicagoland area, do not recruit at Booth directly. So if you're looking to work in a corporate function in Chicago post-graduation, that's something to be prepared for.

Overall BSchool experience (4.0)
Schools contribution (5.0)
Classmates rating (4.0)

Strengths of the program:

Curriculum, Classes, Professors
Location
Facilities

Best fit at this program:

Consulting
Finance
Investment Banking

Can be improved:

Student body, diversity
Culture & Student Support

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I took the Manhattan Prep Bootcamp with Dmitry and Liz. The course offers a quick way to improve performance on the gmat. Both Liz and Dmitry are great teachers, explaining the most straightforward and effective way to understand gmat questions, especially higher level questions. The course particularly helps students work on their development areas; Manhattan Gmat offers many practice exams, the results of which can be used to guide further study plans.

Manhattan Gmat offers the two one-on-one 30 minute sessions with the instructor, where the instructor looks at your practice test results and identifies what you need to work on. Liz reviewed my practice test results, and she told me that I needed to focus on my verbal section, and that I needed in particular to look at critical reasoning inference questions. This advice helped me properly prepare and perform my best on test day.

The materials offers by manhattan gmat are also very helpful. I particularly liked their sentence correction guide, but there are many guides available for every area of the test. These materials are invaluable for self-study, and they're available for many months after you take the course. I am very satisfied with my performance on the gmat, and I am sure that the class helped significantly.

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