You'll have the chance to explore activities outside the classroom in numerous ways that will also allow you to build new skills, relationships, and networks. These include:
- The Investment Banking Group - The largest student group on campus, the Investment Banking Group serves as a link between Investment Banks, Chicago Booth students, and Career Services. Their goal is to equip members with knowledge of the investment banking industry and aid in guiding them to a career in their area of interest. It is our mission to educate the industry about the specific strengths of Chicago Booth students and the Chicago Booth curriculum. Throughout the year, we hold various events to help educate students about investment banking and aid them in navigating the recruiting process.
- Corporate Finance Group - The Financial Analysis and Treasury Group provides support to students pursuing a career in the field of finance within a company. The organization serves members with interests that cross various industries including financial services, high tech, entertainment, consumer products, health care, and energy. The group’s goal is to provide members with information on careers in finance, assistance in their pursuit of such careers, and opportunities to meet professionals in the field. It also hosts the Road to CFO conference.
- Bank Week - Bank Week provides students with an opportunity to visit banks in New York City during the week after the fall quarter ends. The Investment Banking Group (IBG) arranges for banks to host students for lunches, presentations, cocktails, and other networking events. Students participate in informational interviews and those interested in sales & trading often arrange to sit in on trading desks while in New York for Bank Week.
- Hedge Fund Group - This group hosts guest speakers from the industry and seminars presented by Chicago Booth professors. The club also supports students in their recruiting efforts by cultivating industry contracts and assisting with resume preparation.
- National IPO Challenge - The IPO Challenge showcases the nation's top business school talent competing to win a mandate to underwrite an initial public offering. First- and second-year MBA students from leading business schools around the country analyze the proposed offering, develop a structure and price for the transaction, and deliver their presentation to a Board of Directors, comprised of investment banking industry practitioners and leading professors. The structure of the competition is designed to simulate the analysis, preparation, and delivery that investment bankers engage in when competing to win an IPO mandate.
You’ll have the option of taking courses that address your individual career choices. Samples include:
- Entrepreneurial Finance and Private Equity - The primary objective of the course is to provide an understanding of the concepts and institutions involved in entrepreneurial finance and private equity markets. We will explore private equity from a number of perspectives, beginning with the entrepreneur/issuer, moving to the private equity - venture capital and leveraged buyout - partnerships, and finishing with investors in private equity partnerships.
- Portfolio Management - This quantitative course presents advanced material relevant for portfolio managers, extending the material covered in Investments. Topics include the money management industry (mutual funds, pension funds, hedge funds), modern techniques for optimal portfolio selection, liquidity and transaction costs, properties of asset returns, and investment strategies designed to exploit apparent violations of market efficiency.
- Advanced Investments - One central theme this course examines is that asset pricing has undergone a sea of change in the last 20 years or so, with the realization that expected returns do vary across time, and across assets, in ways that the static CAPM and random-walk view does not recognize. The course will cover a range of topics, including how stock and bond returns can be predicted over time; understanding the volatility of stock and bond returns; multi-factor models for understanding the cross-sectional pattern of average returns, such as value, growth and momentum effects; the size of the average market return and its relation to fundamental risks; optimal portfolios that reflect multifactor models, return predictability and hedging motives; advanced trading strategies used by trading desks and hedge funds; performance evaluation and benchmarks for funds; and liquidity effects and "bubbles" in stocks and bonds.
- Cases in Corporate Control and Governance - This course combines law and corporate finance to understand how shareholders try to monitor what public corporations are doing and control what happens to their investment. This course covers ownership and governance from a capital markets perspective. It will be taught using cases from recent years that cover topics such as: takeovers; tender offers, fairness opinions, lockups, staggered boards and poison pills; shareholder activism and proxy contests; squeeze-outs, dual-class voting, and other control structures for closely-held corporations.
- Topics in Asset Pricing - This PhD-level course covers topics in the area of dynamic asset pricing, including standard complete market models, incomplete markets, portfolio constraints and transaction costs, learning and uncertainty, asymmetric information, and other recent developments such as non-time additive preferences. The course will also cover selected topics in the area of derivative pricing and term structure models.
You’ll learn about the forces shaping capital markets around the globe from professors who conduct groundbreaking research, have sat on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, and advised the president and heads of state.
John H. Cochrane, is a research associate and past director of the asset pricing program of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. His recent publications include the book, Asset Pricing, and numerous articles on his research topics. 
Douglas W. Diamond, specializes in the study of financial intermediaries, financial crises, and liquidity. His work has appeared in such notable journals as the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Finance, the Review of Economic Studies, the American Economic Review, and the Journal of Political Economy. 
Eugene F. Fama, is widely recognized as the "father of modern finance." Fama is among the most-cited of America's researchers. He focuses much of his study on the relation between risk, and return and implications for portfolio management. 
Andrea Frazzini, had his PhD thesis, "The Disposition Effect and Under-Reaction to News," published in the winter 2005 issue of the Journal of Finance. It also won the PanAgora Asset Management Crowell Memorial Prize Competition for "the kind of research that is key in building our understanding of how the mechanics of learning behavior impacts the type and quality of information that can be observed in simple market setups." 
Anil K Kashyap, was recognized by the American Finance Association with its 2007 Fischer Black Prize, which honors the top finance scholar under the age of 40. The award cited his "ingenious and careful use of newly available data to address fundamental questions in finance." 
Juhani Linnainmaa, studies learning, asset prices and portfolio choice, mergers and acquisitions, investor behavior, and high-frequency data. 
Tobias J. Moskowitz, was recognized by the American Finance Association with its 2007 Fischer Black Prize, which honors the top finance scholar under the age of 40. The award cited his "ingenious and careful use of newly-available data to address fundamental questions in finance." 
Raghuram G. Rajan, served as Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund between 2003 and 2006. He is the author, along with fellow faculty member Luigi Zingales, of the book, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists. He received the inaugural Fischer Black Prize in 2003.