Booth’s Exciting New Course Offerings

With the autumn quarter in full swing, the Evening and Weekend MBA programs office wanted to share some of the innovative courses and curriculum developments at Chicago Booth. As part of his vision for the school, Dean Madhav Rajan infused more diverse topics and perspectives into the classroom. At Chicago Booth, our students go on to address fundamental problems in our society, and our faculty have adapted the curriculum to meet the evolving needs and interests of our students.

By design, the faculty at Booth have the autonomy to set their own coursework. Instead of going through a complicated committee process, a professor can move forward with the approval of another faculty member. This “living curriculum” allows faculty to be more nimble, and to offer bold, cutting-edge coursework.

Read on for a more detailed look at the new course offerings coming to Booth.

Leadership Curriculum Enhancements

A suite of leadership courses, headed up by the Harry Davis Center for Leadership, provides a supportive community of professional coaches and facilitators to focus on tailored personal development and learning from experience through experimentation and observation. The courses range from a Leadership Practicum that builds more traditional skillsets such as developing credibility, coaching others, and communicating a shared vision, to the Leadership Studio, which will take students into a rehearsal hall and fieldwork to explore various ways of deploying authentic leadership qualities. Lastly, Interpersonal Dynamics, an experiential learning course, is a small group, open forum discussion to build interpersonal communication, learn about how you are perceived, and how to utilize emotions as an information channel.

Women in Business

A course on Women as Entrepreneurs, Venture Capitalists, Private Equity Executives, Investors, and Board Members will examine the world of entrepreneurship and VC/PE from the contemporary lens and perspective of women. The goal of the course is to provide candid insight and purview into the personal and professional lives of leading women executives in the space, and to examine what has helped catapult or impede their ability to lead organizations worldwide.

Social Enterprise and Innovation

This past summer, students took a course called Social Sector Strategy and Structure that studies how strategy and structure not only drive each other, but can obstruct or foster success in the social sector. The class uses cases and exercises to unpack key topics around management and strategy development in this particular space.

Slated for the Winter Quarter, Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation will focus on the role of social entrepreneurship for developing and scaling innovative solutions to society’s problems. Students will go through an in-depth customer discovery process including analyzing the competitive landscape, creating go-to-market strategies, and proposing a business model. The expectation is that many of the teams will proceed to the Social New Venture Challenge in the Spring Quarter in hopes of winning seed funding to support the launch of their business idea.

STEM-eligible Concentrations

In addition to the master’s program in Computer Science, which Booth students can do as the MBA/MPCS joint degree, we now have two STEM-eligible concentrations: Business Analytics and Analytic Finance. STEM eligibility means international graduates on F-1 student visas who earn these concentrations may be eligible to apply for an additional 24 months of training through work experience. While we are unable to have F-1 student visa holders in the Evening MBA and Weekend MBA Programs, this is a great enhancement to Booth’s curriculum.

We hope you enjoyed learning more about the curriculum at Chicago Booth! We invite you to experience it for yourself by visiting a class. See our class visit website for options and to register for a visit. Please reach out with questions about the curriculum, new course offerings, or visiting a class.