That John Waller would attend business school was never in doubt.
He knew it from the time he graduated with a BA in accounting in the late 1980s. At his first postcollegiate job with First Boston (now Credit Suisse), he noticed that the colleagues he admired had all gone to business school. The path before him seemed simple: he would go to business school, too.
“I quickly chose UChicago’s business school as the one I wanted to go to,” Waller says. “Not having the best GMAT scores—my undergraduate grades weren’t perfect, either—I wasn’t too surprised not to be accepted the first time I applied.” Nor did his second attempt make the cut.
In 1992, Waller recalls, he took stock of his situation and attempted to divine the next phase of his career. As luck would have it, a friend of his, then a student at Chicago Booth, told him about the University’s Graduate Student-at-Large: Business (GSALB) program. If accepted, he could take for-credit classes at Chicago Booth and gain exposure to its uniquely rigorous, discipline-based approach. Most enticing of all: he would gain a competitive edge among Chicago Booth’s formidable pool of applicants.
Interested in applying to the GSAL programs?
“This was exactly what I wanted,” Waller says. “I knew I could do the work—I just needed to prove it to the admissions department. So, after being accepted into the GSALB program, I enrolled in an accounting class at Chicago Booth. I got a B for my final grade, and I remember thinking to myself that Bs weren’t going to get me in—I needed to buckle down for the next class.”
And he did just that. He enrolled in a statistics class and hardly missed a single problem across the myriad problem sets he finished that quarter. When he applied to Chicago Booth for the third time, he arrived at his interview armed with proof that he could succeed in the program. They let him in.
After graduating in 1995, Waller moved to Poland to work on a project for the State Department. This presented an opportunity to travel around Central and Western Europe. Upon returning, he used the Booth job board to find a job working in mergers and acquisition at a small firm that would grow enormously in his seven years there. He then set up his own firm. He called it Plaisance Advisors, after the Midway Plaisance park nestled within the University of Chicago campus.
“Almost everything I’ve done in my career, I could not have done without the business school at UChicago,” says Waller, now Managing Director at investment banking firm Prairie Capital Advisers. “The GSAL program sits as the pivotal point setting me on my way. The GSAL program literally changed my life. That’s what opened the door and gave me a broader sense not only for my career possibilities, but for the whole world.”
