Part-Time MBA Student Profile Gus Granchalek
Director, Operations & Performance, Northwestern Memorial Healthcare
City of Residence: Evanston, IL
Education: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Bachelors of Arts in Economics
Gus Granchalek: 00:00
Career Services here at Booth, it’s what you want it to be. I love my job, actually. I love what I’m doing, but that’s not, I think, reason enough to just sit on your laurels and say, “I don't need to look at my resume. I don’t need to consider what’s out there.” The Career Services people, they take the time. It’s not like sitting in a big classroom there. It’s a one-on-one conversation. They’re going through your resume, they’re telling you about their resources, they’re telling you about different opportunities that may exist in the market to X, Y, and Z. It becomes very valuable because it’s so personal and because it’s so specific to you.
Gus Granchalek: 00:00
There is no question that the way I argue, or the way I present points, or the way I try to support a particular position has changed since I’ve been here at school. I find that at the very foundation, it’s much more data driven. So I’ll say something and I’ll know that I’ve got two or three facts to back that up. And that’s not to say before everything I was saying was fictitious, but there’s a sense that what I say is backed up by real data and by the research that I’ve done. That is one of the biggest, biggest changes that I’ve seen in myself. I’m a lot more confident in making a particular point.
Gus Granchalek:
The way in which the teaching occurs at Booth is ... it's timeless. A Booth education, it's foundation, it's pieces. So you don't learn how to respond to this very specific situation that occurred in this case that you're reviewing for class. Instead, I found that professors take blocks. They'll take the finance block, they'll take the econ block, the marketing block, the human element, all of these blocks, and they'll put them together and say, "This is how you can respond to this case. This is a potential path forward." And so when you do that, when you take those individual pieces and you build them up to create a solution to whatever the problem is, you can then take that and move it anywhere and apply it anywhere.
Why Booth?
I think the Booth education and the way in which the teaching occurs at Booth is timeless. I found professors take blocks—they’ll take the finance block, the econ block, the marketing block, the human element, all these blocks—and they’ll put them together and say this is a potential path forward. I anticipate leveraging my Booth education for the rest of my career.
My Advice to Anyone Considering Business School
I think one of the most important things you can get out of an MBA is your network. I knew a big part of the MBA was a network, and here in Chicago there’s really no better choice than Booth.
Favorite Professor
I took a class called Managing the Workplace with Canice Prendergast, W. Allen Wallis Professor of Economics. The information I learned in that class and my ability to apply that to my workplace was unbelievable.