Meet Renee Cherubin ’06, Senior Director of Full-Time MBA Admissions
Hello, it’s a pleasure to meet you! My name is Renee Cherubin, and I am Kellogg’s new senior director of Full-Time MBA admissions at Kellogg.
This will be my first of many posts here, but I wanted to start with the most important detail: I was once in your shoes as a business school applicant, coming from management consulting at Deloitte and trying to decide if Kellogg was the right place for me. I ultimately decided it was, and I went on to become a 2006 alumna of the Full-Time MBA Program.
To say the least, it was a pivotal decision. Kellogg represented a life changing experience for me both personally and professionally.
My Kellogg student journey
As a student here, I pursued leadership and global opportunities that completely transformed my thinking. I participated in Global Initiatives in Management, for which my classmates and I traveled to South Africa, Botswana and Zambia, where we led a consulting project targeted at boosting in-country tourism rates. All told, I visited 11 countries in two years through a combination of global business courses and plans with my network of Kellogg friends.
I was also very active in student government, serving as the student VP for the Career Management Center in my second year. In that role, I had the incredible opportunity to partner directly with our career center leaders to influence the campus recruitment process for my classmates.
The classroom experience, meanwhile, was among the most transformative for me. I still remember the lessons from my Managerial Leadership course taught by Harry Kraemer, former CEO of Baxter and current executive partner of Madison Dearborn, a private equity firm. One point that really emphasizes is the importance of having true self confidence and genuine humility as a leader. You don’t need to have every skill and every answer, but you need to be willing to surround yourself with others who can provide those answers, listen to them and help you evolve your own perspective.
Through all of these activities, I also formed lifelong friendships with my classmates. Two classmates later became bridesmaids in my wedding. Five men and women I met during Kellogg’s international orientation trip, KWEST, still make an annual cross-country reunion trip, bringing along their spouses and children more than 10 years after we’ve graduated.
These experiences at Kellogg have collectively evolved my leadership style, expanded my global business perspective and deepened my analytical skills, enabling me to make a strong impact as a strategy consultant when I returned to Deloitte.
Joining the Kellogg admissions leadership
In 2012,the opportunity arose to return to Kellogg as the director of Evening & Weekend MBA admissions. As I considered it, I reflected on one of my greatest passions throughout my time at Deloitte and as a student at Kellogg: talent. I’m most energized when I’m focused on people, their capabilities and how to make them thrive. And that is precisely what I would be doing in the admissions director role: curating a diverse, top-quality, well-rounded community, which is the lifeblood of the MBA student experience.
With this in mind, I immediately jumped at the chance to take the role, marking my first step back into the Kellogg world in 2012. I am so proud of how our Evening & Weekend MBA Programs have grown, in terms of both offerings and enrollment. We’ve launched an Accelerated Option to allow E&W students to complete an MBA in one year, and made it possible for weekend students to enroll at any quarter throughout the year.
We’ve also evolved our Executive MBA Program, which I added to my admissions purview in 2015. We have nearly tripled our global elective offerings, added even more personalized career coaching and driven a five-year high in female enrollment. I am proud beyond words of the passionate, innovative teams behind these milestones.
What’s next
With all that we have accomplished, it felt like ideal timing for the senior director of Full-Time MBA admissions role to become available this summer, and for me to take this next step in my own Kellogg journey.
I am so energized to dive in and meet our Full-Time MBA applicants. Last year’s full-time class included 46% women, 27% U.S. minorities and 34% international students as well as incredible diversity of thought, industries and backgrounds.
I am eager to leverage my viewpoint as a Kellogg full-time alumna, combined with the lessons from the many innovations we’ve made in Kellogg’s Executive and Evening & Weekend MBA Programs, to continue to evolve our work in Full-Time admissions. And not to mention, Kellogg is in an incredible place; we will soon welcome Dean Francesca Cornelli to campus in August. I look forward to learning from her insights, and I know she will be an inspiring leader for our future incoming classes of students.
Speaking of which, our Full-Time MBA application is now live! As you move forward with your business school journey, I encourage you not only to review our application and admissions website, but also to seek out perspectives that bring Kellogg to life. Tour our beautiful campus, visit a class, attend an upcoming webinar or local admissions event, or connect with our community. You can do this by reaching out to a relevant student club, your nearest Kellogg alumni club or local alumni at your organization. You will find passionate, energetic leaders who are eager to share what made their Kellogg experience so transformative.
I hope this small glimpse into my journey helped to inspire your own. I wish you the best of luck in your business school applications, and please do not hesitate to reach out to the Kellogg MBA Admissions team with questions! We are always available at mbaadmissions@kellogg.northwestern.edu.