Booth Beginnings: My Pre-MBA Entrepreneurial Internship

Andrew Edelman is a first year MBA student at Booth from Boston, MA.  He graduated from Davidson College, where he captained the men’s swimming team, and then worked in investment banking and alternative investment management. At Booth, he plans on pursuing concentrations in Entrepreneurship, Finance, and Strategic Management.  He and his wife are expecting their second son any day now and are looking forward to actually being able to sleep again one day in the distant future.  He enjoys keeping up-to-date on the latest tech trends, playing beach volleyball, and trying out local craft breweries. Follow him on Twitter (@AceEdelman)!

Below, Andrew shares his pre-MBA internship experience with a Booth-founded startup. While pre-MBA internships are neither coordinated by Booth nor necessary to successfully make a big career shift, Andrew took advantage of some free time in Chicago this summer to get some entrepreneurship and marketing experience as part of his professional development at Booth.

--Matt

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Immediately after attending Admit Weekend this past April, my mind was made up.  Blown away by the impressive faculty, successful students, and stunning Harper Center facilities, I decided to forever alter my career path and accept my admission to Chicago Booth.  With that choice came the quick realization that it meant leaving my finance job where I had just been promoted and moving my family from Charlotte to Chicago.  However, these were minor sacrifices to make given the endless opportunities Booth offers for someone like me looking to make a big career change from finance to tech.

To give my pregnant wife, two-year old son, and myself time to settle into our new city before Autumn quarter, I decided to resign from my job a little early to move out to the Midwest.  Wanting to spend my summer doing a little more than eating deep dish pizza and drinking Goose Island beer on one of the many gorgeous beaches along Lake Michigan, I began searching for an internship that could broaden my perspective and further enhance my skill set.

I made a connection with Tricia Felice, a rising second-year student at Booth who was participating in the Polsky Center Accelerator Program, which gives ten student teams the opportunity to work on their businesses during the summer in a collaborative and dynamic environment.  Needing help with business development and marketing for her startup, Vintage, Tricia was eager to have an incoming Boothie join her small team.  As an aspiring career switcher hoping to transition from financial services to the tech industry, it was a unique opportunity to work at a startup and begin developing new skills before even going to my first class.

Vintage brings generations together through storytelling by creating professionally edited “vignettes” to capture the best moments and memories of older adults and celebrate their legacies.  I was tasked with leading efforts in “business development,” something with which I had little experience.  In this context, I developed a keen understanding of our target market and created a well-defined product offering.  I also worked on bringing additional exposure to Vintage through online marketing and beat-the-pavement sales tactics.  Part of this exercise involved my first real exposure to search engine optimization (SEO) and Google AdWords, which was a great learning experience.

One of the things I loved most about working for an early stage startup was the opportunity to be intimately involved in shaping the direction of the company.  Throughout the summer, I was able to give my opinion about the business or our approach to a certain task and not only have it be heard, but be influential.  I strongly suspect this is a feeling I will become quite accustomed to during my two years at Booth as there are a plethora of opportunities to generate significant impact, from participating in Management Lab to joining the Graduate Business Council. I was just elected President of the Davis Cohort, so I am looking forward to making an impact on student life as well.

The support these startups received as part of the Polsky Center Accelerator Program was also extremely impressive.  Teams received funding, office space, access to Polsky Center staff, coaching from faculty (including Waverly Deutsch and Bob Rosenberg), and mentorship from alumni entrepreneurs and Chicago-area investors.  My favorite part of the summer program was weekly teach-in sessions with area entrepreneurs, which really showcased Booth’s success developing entrepreneurial talent.  We met in small groups with Matt Maloney (’10), the Founder and CEO of GrubHub, and Jon Morris (’05), the Founder and CEO of Rise Interactive, both of whom started their companies through the New Venture Challenge while at Booth.  We also had access to 1871, the preeminent co-working space in Chicago that provides startups with programming, educational resources, space, and access to a community of like-minded entrepreneurs.

This pre-MBA internship was a rare opportunity to develop my skills in an environment that fostered creativity while jump-starting my Booth experience.  I’m starting classes this week with a strong understanding of the resources available to entrepreneurs on campus, a growing network of current students and alumni, and additional hands-on experience that will contribute to my career aspirations.  Plus, I learned how to navigate via public transit down to Hyde Park—I will be my class’s expert on the differences between the express and local trains!  Overall, in addition to a transformative pre-MBA professional experience, I was able to enjoy a wonderful summer exploring all that Chicago has to offer.

People Are Good At Many Things Yet Choose to Do One Thing

Liz Han has been an active member of DSAC from the very beginning of the school year, assisting us with the campus visit program. She's also very involved in the entrepreneurship and venture capital community at Booth; she was a SeedCon volunteer and approached me with the idea of blogging about the resources at Booth she's found most helpful thus far. First-year students have the opportunity to pursue their passions from Day 1, which Liz describes below.

Dana
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As we progress in our lives and careers, we have to make critical decisions that impact where we live, what we do, and who we are. For many of you, applying to business school is one such decision. It certainly was for me.

I came to Booth to pursue venture capital and entrepreneurship. I felt inspired on my initial visit to Booth as a prospective student. Beyond the beauty of the Harper Center, I had conversations with students that illustrated to me the opportunities and support Booth provides students interested in venture capital and start-ups, ranging from classes such as Commercializing Innovation to labs including the PE / VC Lab to venture capital and start-up competitions.

Case in point, during Admit Weekend, I stopped by the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and met with Starr Marcello, Director of Operations for the Center. In an hour-long conversation, she shared with me a glimpse into the Chicago venture capital and entrepreneurial ecosystem, and provided me with resources and contacts in VC and start-ups. This is where my journey began.

Three months later, I was helping a healthcare technology start-up that had been born out of and won the New Venture Challenge in 2011. It was founded by a couple of Booth students who were passionate about helping healthcare professionals make better decisions from symptom to diagnosis. In working with them, I not only gained insight into how start-ups think and operate, but also worked towards developing a clinical decision support tool to help providers more effectively care for patients.

When school started, I joined the D4Lab, an entrepreneurship and design-focused fellowship program dedicated to solving issues in healthcare. The program enables my colleagues and I to combine the scientific method with design principles to tackle one of the biggest problems hospitals face today: the bottleneck of hospital admissions from the Emergency Department (ED). On a weekly basis, I work with an interdisciplinary group of fellows from the medical school and the law school among others to observe healthcare professionals in the ED and other departments at the University of Chicago Medical Center, identify specific, concrete challenges and ultimately develop a solution to improve the flow of patients from the ED into the hospital. In addition, I met with second-year students who had incredible experiences as Associates in Hyde Park Angels, an angel network started by Booth alumni in 2006 that takes on select Booth students as Associates every year to source, evaluate, and close investments in early stage start-ups. After two months during which I applied to the program, conducted a deal review and interviewed with current associates and managing directors, I am excited to be joining HPA as an Associate next quarter.

A venture capitalist shared the title quote with me in describing successful entrepreneurs, and I was struck by its simplicity and relevance. Whether you are an aspiring entrepreneur or a management consultant, this quote applies to all of us. We have many options in terms of where to apply our time and skills and it’s up to each of us to choose. For me, it is to help build ideas into companies that will improve the way we live our lives. And it starts at Booth.

Social Impact at Booth

Today, Booth’s social impact community is excited to be at the annual Net Impact conference at the Gleacher Center in downtown Chicago. Net Impact is a student group for MBAs committed to using their business skills to create positive social impact while driving economic value. Some of the areas of interest for members include corporate social responsibility, impact investing, international development, education, and public sector service. Net Impact co-chair, Sarah Walczewski shares highlights of the upcoming conference and explains the role of Social Impact at Booth.

Beth
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Looking Forward to the Conference
As a co-chair of the group, I’m excited for this year’s conference because we’ve tripled in size over last year with 150 students expected to attend. It’s also the first year we’ve hosted a full-day Net Impact conference. There was so much interest from both students wanting to attend and people wanting to speak to Booth students, we couldn’t fit in all in half a day! We have secured some really great speakers, high-profile speakers such as Lois Scott, CFO of the City of Chicago, David Browning, Senior Vice-President of TechnoServe, and Eric Weinheimer (Booth ’94), President and CEO of The Cara Program.

My Path from Sustainability to Booth
Prior to Booth I worked with retail companies to understand and apply best practices in sustainability, and I found it incredibly rewarding to work with large companies to reduce their impact on the environment. However, I knew that sustainability is an enterprise-wide effort, and for me to become a better sustainability professional, it was important for me to find a program that would help me understand the objectives of leaders throughout the business, not just the CSR team. I’m in my second year at Booth, and I believe that my classes are giving me that perspective. In particular, taking the Social Entrepreneurship Lab course during my first year has helped me to get hands on experience in this area. My team worked with the US State Department and a Brazilan private equity firm to identify new business models for increasing electronic waste recycling. It was great learning first-hand about differences between doing business in the US and in Brazil, and the challenges of implementing sustainability in an emerging market. This was great experience to get before I began my summer internship at Deloitte where I got to apply my sustainability background in a consulting environment.

Exciting Changes at Booth
Last spring, Chicago Booth’s administration put a stake in the ground in support of social impact by launching the Social Enterprise Initiative (SEI). At the urging of faculty, alumni, and importantly, students, SEI was formed in order to support faculty research, alumni programming, and student group activities in the social sector. SEI is supporting cutting-edge research in the social sector by Booth faculty, who can later bring that perspective into the classroom. Additionally, Net Impact, along with other social impact-related student groups such as Emerging Markets Group, International Development Group, and Food, Environment, Agribusiness, and Development Group, now benefit from the support of SEI and greater recognition from the administration. We are really excited to see what’s coming next in social impact here at Chicago Booth!