Creating a venture from the ground up requires more than just an idea and a little business know-how. Booth understands that entrepreneurship requires a robust community of other founders, advisors, and experts in a variety of adjacent practices. You can build your network organically as you progress through your MBA—gaining frameworks for problem solving as well as the knowledge and skills necessary to excel at all stages of entrepreneurial ventures from any perspective or role. When you pursue a Chicago Booth MBA as an entrepreneur, you get access to a plethora of resources and a network of invaluable support and mentors.
Hear more from Boothies below.
Emma Lawler: Booth has so many resources for entrepreneurship. If you come here as a really serious entrepreneur, you have a very good chance of being able to succeed in that role.
Nisha Saboo: I took this entrepreneurial discovery my first quarter which really helped and focused on what's my problem that I'm trying to solve, not just the solution, but who am I solving it for?
Johnathan Zhang: That definitely was helpful in terms of putting a lot of the experiences I had from developing the idea to actually building a product into frameworks that were more structured.
Emma Lawler: The Venture Capital Lab, so there's one PE section and one VC section and you find an internship through that program and then you get mentorship through the class.
Nisha Saboo: EVC, the Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Group has been fantastic. They have a lot of founder focused series.
Johnathan Zhang: Your peers as well as your friends are gonna be extremely valuable. We try to meet twice a quarter at minimum just to share our progress and then our feedback on each other's idea.
Emma Lawler: Polsky was another big reason that I came to Booth because it's a devoted center that's very fully staffed and well funded and so I can actually just schedule mentorship meetings with them to talk through my business idea or do a practice pitch or talk through different business models.
Maya Shaposhnik Cadena: Polsky was really my home, I would say. They were extremely supportive of the process and were always also connecting me with other individuals that could help me have more growth.
Nisha Saboo: I was a part of the EIP, Entrepreneurship Internship Program where we are supported financially for the summer to help grow and scale your business.
Maya Shaposhnik Cadena: We also had sessions with a mentor from EIP and we would just talk through some of our challenges.
Johnathan Zhang: What Booth afforded me is to take a little bit more risk because I always know that there's a safety net that I can kind of fall back on.
Maya Shaposhnik Cadena: Booth is the right place for anyone who wants to do an MBA and wants to do the entrepreneurship route. The reason number one is flexibility by far. It just allows entrepreneurs to flourish.
Put your MBA to work in an entrepreneurial role or startup venture.
Entrepreneurship
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From Chicago Booth Scholar to Future Leader: A Firsthand Look into Our Deferred MBA Program
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What's your advice for women considering an MBA?