The Halfway Mark

The following article, capturing my first couple of months at Kellogg, was published in my Financial Times blog today. Reproducing without any edits.

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This morning I received a call from a new admit who’s recently received his Kellogg offer, and has the same doubts that I had when I reached out to my Kellogg buddy around this time last year. The call made me realise that we’re past the halfway mark and have a little less than five months remaining of what has been an exceptionally fulfilling year.

We’re a few weeks into the winter quarter and Jacobs (the main building of Kellogg, named after Donald Jacobs who dean from 1975-2001) seems like a repeat of the fall semester, with students walking about purposively with CVs and ensuring their hair is in place before entering the interview rooms.

This time it’s mostly the first years looking for internships for the summer. Of course this is accompanied with hours of preparation, often with the final year students who’ve been there and done that recently. I can’t stress enough the collaborative culture at Kellogg. Just glad to have been able to be a part of it. It provides you with an opportunity to experience everyone’s successes and also share your lessons with your classmates.

Of course I cannot write a post on Kellogg and Evanston in January without mentioning the snow! Those who’ve been following the column for sometime know how I had never seen snow and was eagerly awaiting the white blanket.

I’m told it’s been a very mild winter by Chicago standards but we have had two-three days of continuous snowfall, which left this scenic suburb looking like a fairyland. A slippery one though.

We also had the annual Kellogg marketing conference earlier this month. The sell out crowd of

 over 500 were thoroughly engaged by the keynote speakers – Mark Addicks, chief marketing officer of General Mills and Alfredo Gangotena, chief marketing officer of MasterCard.

The day also included some highly stimulating conversations on the different panels on brand perception turnaround, creating dialogue with consumers: value co-creation and changing the game, mobile marketing (moderated by the superstar Prof Sawhney) and others.

#kmc12, the chosen hashtag for the conference was making frequent appearances in all our Twitter timelines.

I have to end the post on the epic basketball game played between Kellogg & Chicago Booth prior to the Chicago Bulls V Milwaukee Bucks NBA match at the United Center.

It was an incredible experience to watch our classmates playing on the same court as Derrick Rose and others. Our boys made the evening that much memorable by giving us a 15-10 win over our friends from the city!