How to Plan a Booth Career Trek in Five Easy Steps: West Coast Marketing Edition

My name is YaoYao Wang and I’m a first-year MBA at Booth.  This past quarter I helped organize a West Coast Marketing Trek for my classmates over Winter Break.  The trip provided great opportunities for Booth students to get a leg up in internship recruiting, get to know the great companies which hire Booth talent, and spend some quality time with classmates.  As I found out, organizing a trek is hard work, but a rewarding way to engage with the broader Booth community and give back to your classmates.  Here are my five easy steps for organizing a trek:

1.       Decide where you want to go and why

In the weeks leading up to Winter Break, first-years are faced with many difficult decisions: go home for break, relax in Chicago, go on the Ski Trip, or go on one of the many career treks for future bankers, venture capitalists, marketers, retailers, techies, and entrepreneurs. As part of the Chicago Booth Marketing Group, my classmate Joanna Wung and I were excited to lead the West Coast Marketing Trek.   While the Marketing Group had traditionally offered an annual Brand Week on the East Coast, and the annual Tech Trek visited large tech companies on the West Coast, we felt that we could offer something to first-years that was a combination of the two. Since Joanna and I are both originally from California, we knew that we could show our classmates around while also pursuing our professional interests in marketing.

2.       Learn Trek best practices from the experts!

Joanna and I met with Anna Sukenik, one of the Marketing Group Co-Chairs who had led the previous year’s Brand Week, to learn how to organize a trek. This was just the beginning of many helpful interactions we would have with the second years. We also met with various members of the Career Services team to learn about their experiences with Career Treks, their resources and where they could help us. We learned that the alumni network is a great place to start reaching out to people. It was great to get support from so many Booth resources who could give us the benefit of their expert experience.

Trek participants at a SF alumni
networking event

      3.       Get companies signed up!

Our goal was to get companies to set aside some time for us to tour their offices, speak with alumni and current employees, and listen to a company presentation. We created a target list of CPG, food and beverage, pharmaceutical, tech, and retail companies with marketing roles to visit and split up the research to contact alumni. On our radars were some of the largest and most well-known tech companies and mega-retailers, but also some smaller, niche consumer companies. We were amazed by the willingness of Chicago Booth alumni to help out with our trek, even though we had never met any of them before. Some even referred us to their friends at other companies so we could visit them as well! Such a strong showing was a testament to the power of the Booth network.

      4.       Get classmates signed up!

With a list of companies we were working with in hand, we set out to get trek attendees. Joanna and I publicized the trek to our classmates via email blasts and word-of-mouth, thinking that a week in California wouldn’t be too hard to sell to anyone. We got a great group of first-years interested in careers in marketing at California-based companies who were excited to pound the pavement during their Winter Break.

5.       Go on the trek!

Ok, so maybe I skipped a couple of steps (and massive amounts of emails) here but I learned that you can plan out every single minute and still forget some detail. For example, one company had an enormous campus and we ran around trying to find our way out of the maze.  As a result we had to rush to our next meeting. The best you can do in a situation like that is use your best judgment and roll with the punches.

The Trek group outside Google, one of the companies on the Trek

While there are hundreds of companies that give us the convenience of recruiting on-campus with job postings and interviews on-site, there are hundreds more that want to hire Booth MBAs. The trek taught me the importance of reaching out to companies for off-campus opportunities. With so many great resources at our disposal – including second years, student groups, Career Services, and of course the Booth alumni network – the sky’s the limit for our professional goals.

My First Booth Case Challenge – Kilts Quantitative Marketing Case Competition

First-year MBA YaoYao Wang recently competed in a quantitative marketing case challenge sponsored by Booth’s Kilts Center for Marketing and Kraft Foods.  It was a unique opportunity for YaoYao and her team to test out the marketing skills developed during their first quarter at Booth, and to engage with Booth alums at Kraft, who were very involved in making the competition a great experience for the participants. The case competition shows a number of Booth’s strengths – our analytical and data-driven approach to business problems, the deep and active alumni network represented in a variety of industries and functions, and the Kilts Center – which make Booth an incredible choice for anyone looking get into a career in marketing.

Booth is off for Winter Break for now.  Enjoy the holidays, and stay tuned to The Booth Experience to learn more about what students do during break, including Ski Trip, career treks, and planning for Round 1 Admit Weekend!

--Matt

As a first-year taking Marketing Strategy and recruiting for marketing internship roles, I was naturally drawn to Booth’s inaugural Kilts Quantitative Case Competition, sponsored by Kraft Foods. Since the Kilts Center for Marketing focuses on advancing marketing at Chicago Booth, this was a perfect fit. I appreciated how involved Kraft Foods got with the case competition; not only did they send three executives, including Deanie Elsner ('92), Chief Marketing Officer; Greg Guidotti, Senior Director of Marketing, Ready-to-Drink Beverages; and Triona Schmelter, Vice President of Marketing for Meals, to be judges, they also developed the case from a recent and very real business issue the company was facing with one of its major brands, Planters. Two Booth alumni and Kraft Senior Associate Brand Managers, Johnni Rodgers (’12) and Ketan Vaghani (’09), developed the case over the course of eight months using Nielsen data.

Five Pleasantly Surprising Facts about Life at Chicago Booth

My name is YaoYao Wang and I’m a first year MBA student at Booth, originally from Los Angeles, California. Prior to business school I worked as an Operations Manager at a health products startup while being the CMO of a volunteer-run nonprofit. Outside of work and school, I love playing badminton, cooking, and Yelping. Follow me @yaoyaowang where I tweet about all sorts of business school fun.

In just a few short months as an MBA student at Booth, I’ve learned a few valuable lessons and pleasantly surprising facts.  I share my Top 5 with those of you considering an MBA at Booth. Hopefully my lessons will provide insight into the wealth of opportunities at Booth, as well as the best way to navigate your decision-making to get the most out of your experience.

1. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

No, I’m not actually referring to Newtonian physics here. As a business school student, you quickly learn to manage your time very well; and often, what you’ll find is that you can’t add events to your calendar without taking something off. Planning your career, networking, learning in business school? I’ve quickly learned the key to success is actually all about mastering the art of making tradeoffs. If you can’t decide which amazing classes, student clubs, and recruiting opportunities to sacrifice over others, you’ll get great guidance from Career and Academic Services. And since this is Chicago Booth, home of brilliant professors and Nobel prize-winning economists, concepts like opportunity cost and marginal utility will creep into your daily vocabulary before you even know it, and will help you make these tough decisions.

2. Use your pre-MBA summer wisely.

Once school starts you will have 20 million events and deadlines on your calendar (Legal disclaimer: OK, maybe not literally 20 million events and deadlines, but there are tons of opportunities here!). If you can, take time before Booth to travel, spend time with family and friends, work out, eat healthy, and sleep.

See if you still know how to study. This sounds pretty basic but you’d be surprised at how many of us realize that being in the workforce for a few years has made us forget how to be students. A great way to regain your learning skills would be to take an online class or even a local language or art class.

3. Second years are to first years like sliced bread and zippers are to humanity.

A third thing I didn’t fully understand before starting Booth is the tremendous value that second year MBAs add to the business school experience. Their willingness to help knows no bounds. Got questions about internships, careers, resumes, interviews, classes, housing, transportation, or what to wear in the Chicago winters? Second years will help you with that. I always find myself shocked with the amount of time second years put into planning events that improve first years’ business school experience, whether it be Random Walks, LEAD, student groups, school-wide events, company presentations, workshops, social events, trips, or mixers. If you ask them why, you’ll get a shoulder shrug that downplays their involvement and the usual, “the second years were there for us when we first got here.” You’ll see this sense of paying it forward permeating the Chicago Booth network from the first years all the way up to the alumni.  

4. There is such a thing as free lunch.

In the form of Lunch ‘n’ Learns, that is! Career Services and the career-focused student groups host prominent companies from various functions and industries to recruit MBA talent and these presentations often come with free meals! Though I’ve enjoyed not having to buy lunch my first quarter because I’ve been to so many events, the real “free lunches” are the valuable interactions Career Services has facilitated with Booth alumni from companies large and small. Through presentations of mini case studies of recent challenging problems they’ve faced or explaining their company culture and values, I’ve found it invaluable to learn about fit and culture at companies I’m interested in. It’s a two-way street, because as much as companies are recruiting us, we are also scoping them out to make sure we might enjoy our time there as an intern or full-time hire. Additionally, Career Services has been really helpful in working with us to make sure we have a good sense of our career goals and personal needs to get the most out of these events and interactions.

5.  Any interest or hobby you can think of, it’s probably here.

We have an amazing array of student groups solely focused on fun, hobbies, diversity, and interests. Food, wine, boxing, rugby – you name it, we’ve got it. Clubs are a great way to meet new friends who may not be in your classes or recruiting for the same career path. In addition to the extensive list of student groups people are constantly organizing informal events.

I could easily go on and on about the wonderful experience that Chicago Booth has been for the last two and a half months (that’s right, we’ve only been here for two and a half months!) but, there’s no blog or list that could tell you what it’s really like at Booth. For me, speaking with current students and alumni at locally-hosted Booth events and visiting the campus really helped me decide that Booth was the right place for me. As a prospective student, I met so many great people with diverse backgrounds and fascinating life stories, and I’m enjoying getting to know them now as my peers and classmates.

I look forward to seeing you at an on-campus event and welcoming you to our school!