Как проходят время в бизнес-школе? Лето, весна, зима...выпуск. Что приходится делать все это время, что остается в памяти выпускника, а что просто проходит не замеченным? Эти не простые вопросы хотелось бы всегда знать еще до отъезда в школу. Великолепное эссе о жизни в бизнес-школе от выпускника 2006 бизнес-школы Kellogg.

Beginning
This was quite a change for me – from the dusty and noisy streets of Moscow to the calm lakeshore of Evanston, a town located 13 miles north from downtown Chicago with a population of just 75,000 people. I missed the morning session of the orientation program (I thought it was not worth and extra $$ for the ticket) and I flew in on the day we were supposed to have our first social in Bar Louie. It was after the orientation week when I realized that there are only 3 or 4 places to go after long day at school for so called “study beer”. But enough about beer.

Back in Moscow I received an envelope from Kellogg and was wondering what’s inside. This was about 1 month before the program start I did not expect anything from school. That was a list of my future class–mates which also contained their prior to Kellogg employment data as well as home country. I remember sitting at my desk with a pencil in my hand and carefully going through the list wondering who those people are I will study with. Here comes the first surprise (although somewhat expected) – I spotted Przemek and Filip from McKinsey Warsaw office, Gabor from Budapest office and Tenchai from Bangkok. A good 40% percent of our class are former consultants, especially from Europe. So, it turns out that not only I but many other people know that the best b-schools are in US (I hope that my colleagues Vlad and Misha who went to INSEAD cannot hear me from there J).

Summer Quarter

The summer quarter turned out to be real fun. Not only we played football 2 times a week but I also started jogging and went a few to times to swim in the lake. Back then I did not have car therefore walking to 20-25 min to and back from school, absence of Sodexho meals and all the above mentioned activities led to me losing 6 kg which actually felt great. The best class in summer for me was 10 week course which combined probabilistic modeling and regression analysis. Professor Weber was one of the smartest people I met in my life and managed to teach everything you need to know about regression and made everyone update their beliefs about statistics.

The final touch of the summer was our KWEST trip to Mexico under the code name “Real Cancun!” There were 20 of us (15 incoming students and 1Ys led by 5 second-year students) who flew from hot Chicago to even hotter and more humid Cancun. The idea of trip was to get to know people and make friends before the fall quarter starts so that you can later form study groups if you are enrolled in the same class or simply say “hello” to each other in school. Although it was not the spring break timing the city did not lack any party atmosphere and we experienced it all in full. My experience shows that Ukrainians get along quite well with guys and gals from Colombia, Mexico, Brazil and India who later became my best friends in Kellogg.

Fall
After having the school at the disposal of just ~80 people (70 students from our section and a few professors teaching in summer) we saw another 1,200 students flooding the Jacobs center when fall quarter started. You can imagine what kind of change that was.

There are 2 main things that I remember about fall quarter. The first one is the class called “Managerial Leadership” by Harry Kraemer. The professor was Kellogg alum, who served as CFO and later CEO of Baxter International, $9bn medical device and healthcare solutions company. We had interesting discussions about leadership based on the reading assignments and personal experience and I still remember his definition of leadership as the right balance between self-confidence and genuine humility. But the most exciting assignment was writing 10 personal reflection notes over the course of the class on the topics related to leadership, career, conflicts of interest, etc which he all read, commented and very often offered his help.


The second one was a student consulting project for American Express Business Travel which was agreed by Dean Jain and AmEx CEO Kenneth Chenault. We developed some really exciting stuff from collaborative filtering to developing new business models for AmEx. We initially presented our findings to his VPs who were so excited and pleased with the results that literally were offering each of us a job with AmEx. It was by all means a successful project after which AmEx decided to continue cooperation with Kellogg and its CEO agreed to be the keynote speaker at our graduation ceremony.

Winter/Spring

Wintertime is Chicago was cold and dark so I though it was the right time to study. In addition to obvious marketing major I took some finance, private equity and entrepreneurship classes. I have never thought I will be involved in doing PERCS valuation or allocating assets using Markowitz tool and structuring term sheet but it happened. I also liked one class where we were given actual PE/VC cases to study and then we had to tease out what could go terribly right and wrong with the potential investment. What’s more interesting that the very VC leading the deal was present the case discussion who revealed at the end of the class whether they made the investment and what happened with it later on.

As soon as spring came everyone became more relaxed and laid back especially graduating students with offers who felt they have to spend more time with each other because graduation day was coming closer and closer. Only 1st-year students were desperate to fill in the blanks in the skills sets prior to their internships. This did not mean the classes were over and I took some really great courses like Negotiations as well as Human Element in Private Equity. I also learnt to play Texas Hold’em and spend a few nights playing poker with my buddies.

Finally, I am back in Moscow ready to get started in McK in September and trying to connect to Kellogg alums in Moscow with whom we already had 2 events. They are great crowd and as expected they hold top management positions in, to name a few, Colgate-Palmolive, Alfa Capital Partners, Roland Berger, SAP, A.T. Kearney, Baring Vostok Capital Partners and GE.
 
And yet one final thing, beer tastes much better here :)

Мы благодарим Игоря за интереснейшее эссе и не менее интересные фото! Желаем ему успехов и новых карьерьных высот!