Culture at Kellogg: One big family
Admission season seems to be in full force, and I’ve received a few emails from applicants with questions along the lines of:
– What’s Kellogg’s culture like?
– What’s so different about Kellogg?
– How many calories does a typical Kellogg student have to eat in a day in order to survive? (I made this last one up … interesting question, though).
Anyway, I thought I’d share my experience that I feel aptly sums up Kellogg culture.
A quick recap: I’m a MMM (not pronounced ‘mmmmm’; it’s ‘triple-m’!). My classmates and I started Kellogg at the end of June, while the rest of the Two-Year (2Y) 2016 class started in September. That means for an entire summer, the 60 of us MMMs did almost everything together: classes, dinners, pot-lucks, sports, cubs games, group assignments and hanging out at local watering holes.
We experienced everything as one big family.
In September, when 2Ys started, all first years (MMMs and 2Ys) were dispersed into sections, each around 60-70 strong. The first day of CIM (Kellogg’s answer to orientation week), I met the rest of my section (the best section there is, by the way – the Big Dogs). Remembering 61 new names, pairing them to faces, backgrounds and personalities was amazingly confusing. The evening of the very hectic first day, we were all on our way to an event, and this is what ran through my mind:
“Wow. So many new faces and people. Could be overwhelming … Well, at least I’ve got three people here that I’ve known since high school”.
As I was revelling in that thought, it hit me. That fact seemed highly implausible. High school was ages ago in Mumbai, and I definitely did not know those three people then.
Where did I know them from?
Then it struck me! I’d met them a mere two months ago at Kellogg. At that very moment, I was so comfortable around them that my instinct was to associate them to people I must have met years ago. How else could you explain the level of camaraderie and friendship?’
That, right there, is my extremely long-winded effort to try and explain Kellogg culture. Two months is what it took for me to consider 59 other MMMs my ‘faMMMly’.
What of the Big Dogs, you ask? Well … it’s been just over seven weeks since I met them (I think), and it’s already hard for me to think of a time when I thought they were strangers. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what makes Kellogg’s culture magical.
Shriansh Shrivastava ’16 (@Shriansh) grew up in India, spent 10 years in the UK (undergrad + an awesome job working with unreleased cellphones + then worked on a mental health suicide prevention project – using smartphones, of course), and finally spent a year in Canada working for an ATM software company (Learning a lot! At this stage, I can pretty much dismantle any ATM).