Get to Know the Evening Weekend Student Life Team

Our Student Life team is a jack of all trades. We advise 40+ student groups, run large-scale events, collaborate with other Booth offices such as Career Services and Alumni Relations, and serve as a general resource to any student, including those who are struggling to find the right way to get involved in our robust community.

Who we are

Stacey Ergang, Senior Director, Student Life

I am lucky enough to be responsible for overseeing the larger Student Life team and ensuring that we continue to fully support the rich and robust Booth student community.  I also get to serve as advisor to the Student Advisory Council (SAC), the group of students who work to further improve the student experience for our Evening and Weekend students. 

What continues to keep me motivated and enjoying my job is meeting and working with our students.  Booth students are some of the most interesting and talented people around. I love interacting with students, whether in meetings or when attending virtual events. Working with our students remains the best part of my job. 

Carrie Lydon, Director, Student Wellness

I’m responsible for our wellness initiatives, encouraging students to take a holistic view of their overall well-being. I look at how we can best serve and work alongside our students to ensure that they are taking care of their body, mind, spirit, and community. We offer quarterly workshops and events, as well as one-on-one coaching sessions that focus on topics such as time management, mindfulness skills, and building resilience. I love working with students to make changes that positively impact their lives and communities!

Leeanna Morris, Assistant Director, Student Life

I work with our Chicago Business Fellows, who are early career students, organizing programming for their first quarter. I advise a third of our student groups and run the Faculty Connect Programing, which offers our Part-Time students a unique opportunity to connect with faculty outside of the classroom. I also coordinate the Partners programming, including signature events like the Mag Mile Watch Party and the Family picnic. I love working with my many student groups and helping them turn their ideas into great events! 

Micaela O’Halloran, Associate Director, Student Life

I oversee the day-to-day operations of our Part-Time Student Life team. I manage our student leader process and work with a third of our student groups. I also manage and support many different student experiences, including co-curricular activities, student trips, and graduating students. I love creating and supporting student-facing opportunities that can contribute to an individual’s MBA journey. It is exciting to see how students define their experience and transform by the time they graduate!

Erin Swinehart, Assistant Director, Student Life 

I’m responsible for LAUNCH, our orientation program for Part-Time students, which includes the Mentor Program. I also facilitate Life After LAUNCH, a year-long program aimed at strengthening cohort relationships during a student’s first year at Booth. I advise a third of our student groups and run Boothies Breaking Bread, our quarterly small group dinner series.   LAUNCH is my favorite event because I love being able to work with our newest Boothies and help as they transition to Booth and start their MBA journey! 

What exactly does Student Life do?

The Student Life team is charged with building and supporting the Booth student community, with a large part of that including working with student leaders to help bring events to campus and connect groups to companies locally and across the country. What’s great about our student groups, is there’s a little bit of everything. We have career-focused groups that we work closely with Career Services on. We also have social groups like the Outdoors club and Book club. These groups strike a nice balance between how students can get involved and how they can connect with others across similar interests and areas. We also run some of our larger-scale signature events such as orientation, graduation celebrations, the seminar for Chicago Business Fellows, and more, as well as a variety of networking events for students to attend.

While the Gleacher Center has been closed, the Student Life team has offered a variety of virtual events. These have included Trivia nights and Boothies Breaking Bread, where students were grouped over Zoom to eat dinner together. We recently launched a new series called Connections and Conversations that pair students up with a conversation partner for a quarter.

In Autumn, we hosted the student group fair through an interactive virtual platform with information booths, live chats, and Zoom networking rooms for each group. In November, we are excited to run our annual Mag [Magnificent] Mile watch party virtually.

How else do you directly support students?

Our role is to empower students and provide resources to ensure that at the end of their time here, they’ve cultivated their own experience outside of the classroom. We provide varied ways to get involved at different levels of engagement, whether high or low, so students feel that being engaged in this community is accessible and works for them. 

What’s next for Student Life?

What’s exciting and on the horizon is that we’re thinking about more ways to engage students beyond Gleacher. We recognize that our students can’t always be here. We are working to create programs and events that can be accessible via webinars or online recordings. Our goal is to continue to evolve along with our students, so there’s always something new that is a work in progress.