Business at UChicago

LearningLover
Sun, 27 Dec 2015 01:10:47 +0000

Note: I’m a 3rd year in the college in dougan scholars, more on the quant fin./algo trading track. Feel free to PM me if you like, can talk in depth.

Ok, so management consulting doesn’t require significant hard ‘skills.’ The interview process involves market sizing case questions, basic accounting, general business knowledge. You don’t need to actually be a business major to have a good chance of getting a job.

You can take as many booth classes as you want, up to 6 for general elective credit. Whatever you end up majoring in, you’ll have room in your schedule to take the classes you want. Dougan Scholarship just means you have priority bidding over other college students and a bit of a mentorship add-on, but it’s not necessary if you just want to take the classes you want and learn.

Not going to wax too much about quality of Booth classes, but I’ve genuinely enjoyed them and they’ve been a big help for me career-wise. Ex: in fin. statement analysis, end of quarter project was writing a research report on a company, and we presented to a hedge fund which happened to have a position in one of the two companies we could choose to present on and had an internship slot they wanted to fill from within the class.

For business/consulting, Wharton is objectively better in every category outside of probably quant finance. Given any other choice I’d personally take UChicago.

UChicago has a pretty crazy amount of on-campus recruiting for business/consulting. IBanking, Sales & Trading, and various types of consulting roles are recruited for extremely heavily, and since Chicago’s the location of many of the top trading firms it’s quite good for prop trading as well.

My 2 cents is that anything you need to learn for business you can learn outside of class. UChicago has an active business-interested community, and the RSO’s are legit. Blue Chips for value investing, Eckhart Consulting for consulting are the two extremely competitive ones, and there’s a laundry list of 2nd-tier (in terms of difficulty of exclusivity, not a big difference in quality) other groups which perform similar roles.

At this point UChicago’s getting a very strong alumni network, and we have a reputation/track record of usually getting full-time return offers/having firms expand number of slots allotted to us for internships once they start recruiting (I know this more explicitly about business/finance roles rather consulting which isn’t my focus).