Six months in: what Chicago Booth is actually changing about how I think
Two completed quarters at Booth. What has actually shifted — not what I expected to shift, but what I can observe in how I think and operate now.
I am two quarters into Chicago Booth. What I want to write here is not a summary of the courses — those have their own posts. This is about what six months has revealed about how I actually operate: where I was coasting on assumption, where I underestimated the environment, and what I am still figuring out.
The biggest shift: precision about effort, not just ideas.
Before Booth, I thought I was reasonably rigorous. I was not. I was reasonably good at being fluent — finding language that sounded precise without actually being precise. The courses sharpened the thinking. What sharpened me more was a few situations where I showed up under-prepared and had to watch it happen in real time.
In the second quarter, I applied for a co-chair position at the Booth Product Management Club. I was curious about how the club operated, wanted to get more involved. My application was shortlisted. I got an interview.
I went in without preparing.
I assumed I could think through questions on the spot. That assumption showed. I did not answer some of the basic questions clearly, and I could tell during the interview that I was not doing justice to my own experience. I did not get selected. I asked for feedback and did not receive any.
It was a useful reminder that this pattern — assuming fluency is enough — has a cost everywhere, not just in academic settings. Booth makes the cost visible faster than most environments.
The baseline here is real.
Toward the end of the first quarter, after the hackathon win, my team decided to participate in the VCIC competition. We were drained. We went in without the same preparation and commitment we had brought to the earlier work. The result was immediate — we did not qualify.
That was a clear signal about how Booth works. The environment has a real competitive floor. When you drop below it, it shows quickly and without much cushion. You cannot selectively engage and expect selective results.
The discipline this taught me is not about working harder indiscriminately. It is about being honest before committing. Either prepare fully or do not enter. Doing things halfway at this level produces outcomes that are worse than not doing them at all.
Community — and what actually makes it work.
I came to Booth primarily for the intellectual sharpening. I underestimated the community, and I was right about the first thing.
The most concrete example I have is from the hackathon. One of our teammates, Ludmilla, came from a completely different background than the rest of us. We made a conscious effort to incorporate her perspective instead of defaulting to what the engineers on the team already knew. It made a tangible difference in how the product was framed and why it resonated.
That is what the community actually gives you — not connections in the transactional sense, but access to people who are thinking about adjacent problems from different angles. The value is not in the network. It is in the friction that comes from thinking alongside someone whose priors are genuinely different from yours.
I am introverted in new environments. I do not naturally initiate conversations, even though I engage deeply once I know people. That has limited how much I have extracted from the community so far. It is something I am actively working on, not as a social goal but as a practical one. The returns from being present are real, and I have been leaving some of them on the table.
What Booth is actually doing.
I expected graduate business school to make me better at talking about strategy. What it has actually done is make me less tolerant of strategy that cannot be operationalized.
The through-line across all of it — the courses, the competitions, the interviews, the community — is the same: frameworks are only valuable when they survive contact with a real decision. The Booth curriculum, at its best, is a system for building tolerance for that kind of contact.
Six months in, this is harder and more useful than I expected. The difficulty is not mostly about workload. It is about being asked, repeatedly, to be more precise than you thought you needed to be — about your ideas, your effort, your preparation, and how you show up.
I cannot always control what I am naturally good at. I can control how prepared I am and how consistently I show up. That is the standard I am holding myself to for the rest of my time here.