DAK closed off on Saturday night at Martini Park in Chicago. (c).
Kellogg's admit weekend, DAK, was pretty intense. What struck me most about the event was the scale - for the 250 or so admits at the event, a large workforce of upwards of 200 current students must have been involved to make it all work: career panels, club fairs, KWEST trip fair, "section time" leaders and much, much more.
Some of the highlights for me were as follows...
- I turned up at the Prairie Moon bar on Thursday 5th February for the DAK welcome drinks. With lots of brown wood and dim lighting, it seemed just like the small town bar I imagined it to be. The admits attending DAK were split into six sections of 30 or so people. My section, the Jugheads, were having welcome drinks in this bar. I was assured by one of the other admits, "yeah - the section names we have now are the junior version of the real section names... the equivalent real section name for Jugheads is Bigjugs". Unfortunately, he was wrong - they're called Bucketheads. We had six or seven current first year students acting as section leaders. Confident, talkative and upbeat, I found the section leaders to be really great stewards for that evening and the rest of DAK - a huge contrast to the sometimes nervous looking admits wondering who to talk to.
- Admissions Director, Beth Flye kicked off the Opening Ceremony on Friday. She welcomed the admits. "I don't know what kind of vitamins you're taking", she said, citing the admits' average GMAT of 719, average GPA of 3.6-something and a host of startling admission essay extracts. These extracts included people who had started voluntary organizations, released music records, achieved significant athletic success, hosted weekly cable tv shows and more besides.
- Professor round-table lunches featured members of the faculty talking through what their programs covered. I attended those for Media Management and Entrepreneurship. Michael Smith talked about how the Media Management program sought to answer questions about varying forms of media - professional and user-generated, proprietary distribution and open distribution - and the challenges businesses faced in order to develop business models that generate revenues in the current advertising (and wider economic) downturn. Scott Whitaker surveyed the entrepreneurship offerings available at Kellogg. I was surprised not only by how many admits were interested in entrepreneurship, but how serious they were - asking really deep questions, such as how they could get a head start on doing something entrepreneurial at Kellogg.
- Marketing Mini Class: I found this to be thought provoking and entertaining. The class started with the professor asking "what is marketing?" and taking responses from the audience. He then delved into the importance of customer insight based marketing versus marketing that lacked customer insight. For example, Marmite customers take pride in that some people hate the taste marmite. Consequently, Marmite used this insight to develop the successful "Marmite: you love it or hate it" series of commercials.
- Strategy Mini Class: After we had read a mini-case, the professor asked us to identify why Costco was so successful and how they would fair in the current economic climate. The session was mostly done through eliciting responses from the audience. I had thought the session would go in a particular direction relating to supplier power, but was impressed when it went on a tangent about membership fees that also seemed appropriate.
- Careers Service Overview. The center seeks to train students in the life skill of finding jobs, rather than just providing them with jobs. They have staff that work with you through the entire process of determining what you want to do to mock interviews to celebrating the success of getting offers. A testimonial by a student, where she described her story and the doubts she faced, was particularly effective in describing the process.
- Scavenger Hunt, games and other "section time". These were kooky, just as our sections leaders described them, but they were actually a lot of fun. I thought they helped the admits get to know each other somewhat and lowered inhibitions. Our scavenger hunt included piggy back races and dizzy bat.
- Welcome address by Dean Jain.
- Dean Jain told the story of how he had joined Kellogg. His supervisor had told him that there was no future in math and that he should join the top marketing school, Kellogg. He wondered why the top marketing school would take him, the worst marketing person. Despite this, he had an interview with Kotler and others. He presented some math which perhaps no one on the panel understood. Kotler asked, "this is marketing?"; Dean Jain replied "this is the future of marketing".
- He described how Kellogg had risen to become a top 5 school:
- Focusing on developing students' collaborative working skills, interviewing all students that apply so as to evaluate their soft skills and focusing the MBA on developing soft skills such as teamwork.
- Through recruiting exemplary faculty in basic disciplines rather than competing for typical business school faculty. This is in turn helped Kellogg produce unique research.
- Through initiatives throughout the 70s and 80s, such as the Executive MBA program, spreading the quality of the program by word of mouth. "For word of mouth marketing to work, there needs to be many mouths".
- Dean Jain ended the session by looking to the future, developing the school's brand, global perspective and a number of other things I can't remember right now.
- An alumni panel of three Kellogg graduates offered their advice. They all agreed that the Kellogg alum network is close-knit and there is an implicit understanding that Kellogg alumni will help each other when called upon. They urged admits to use the opportunity of business school to develop their networking skills.
- Keynote Speaker: Scott Smith '76, former President of the Chicago Tribune. His main message was that perceiving the situation is often under-rated compared to taking action. The compared this to the current economic situation, where a lot of action had been taking, but has the situation been correctly perceived to choose the right action?
- The Closing Ceremony took place in Chicago itself, with buses carry the admits to the River East Art Center for dinner, followed drinks and partying in Martini Park. By this point, many of us had got to know each other quite well and the evening was an opportunity to develop those friendships further over buffet lunch in the exquisite surroundings of River East, as well as dancing and joviality at Martini Park, which seemed to be full of beautiful people. I thought it was great night of gossip and final ultimatems between admits, "have you decided on Kellogg yet?".
I met some awesome people over the weekend. I thought I would be able to get along with most of the admits, and really become tight-knit with some of them too. Three of of the Kellogg admits who have been following my blog managed to identify me :-O. It was good meeting to you guys. This article tip is a good one, French girl - thanks.
Updated, 7th Mar '09
- Orlando's photo/videos via his blog
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