He gives us the rundown of the courses that have impacted him, events that help foster technical expertise, and offers advice to incoming students currently in tech or looking to switch into tech.
The course offerings at Booth are so dynamic that I have been able to take classes and leverage them in what I do in tech. I’m a senior product manager at Relativity, a computer software company, so having the lens of a MBA has augmented my ability to work across the entire organization and be more effective as a result.
Course Offerings:
A large number of professors come from a place of deep industry expertise. My two favorite courses were Lindsey Lyman’s Building the New Venture course and Mark Knez’s Tech Strategy class. I was really impressed by Professor Knez’s thoughts and orientation around how start-ups disrupt and how large corporations can continuously innovate. The quality of our professors is really impressive- it’s clear that anyone who doesn’t have a background in product development can get a pretty good feel for what that’s really like through the course offerings.
Other great tech related courses include: New Venture Strategy, The FinTech Revolution, Big Data, Machine Learning, and Application Development.
Extracurriculars:
The Tech Group is great at bringing in alumni from all kinds of different companies who can give us a feel for what it’s like to work there and be successful. The networking opportunities have been really strong, especially with high powered executive alumni. I facilitated a conversation with Kurt DelBene, the chief digital officer at Microsoft and he gave us his email to reach out to him if he could ever be of any help. I have had a fantastic response rate when reaching out to alumni.
This year, the Tech Club will facilitate workshops with knowledge sharing sessions with people who have domain expertise. We’ll be working in partnership with groups like the Analytics Club and Kilts Center for Marketing. For example, when organizing large amounts of data- what’s the minimum I need to know on a high level to be an effective leader? What do I need to be able to articulate to work with engineers effectively?
Other resources include: the annual Booth Tech conference and Booth Hacks to learn coding.
My Advice for Students:
At Chicago Booth, the Kilts Center for Marketing helps facilitate experiential-learning opportunities for students via highly collaborative marketing lab courses. These courses give students space to apply what they learn in the classroom and put it toward real-world projects for sponsor-clients.
Chicago Booth FAQ: Marketing Lab Courses
From Hacking for Defense to Leadership at the Movies, learn about Chicago Booth’s new class offerings for 2021-2022.
Chicago Booth's New MBA Courses
The graduate of the Evening MBA Program speaks about how his Booth MBA helped him transition within Morningstar and prepare for the challenges in the workforce and real-world.
Meet Michael Sawula, ’19
