Kellogg School of Management

Location

Kellogg is the business school of Northwestern University.  Northwestern has their law school and medical school campuses in downtown Chicago, while Kellogg and their undergraduate programs are located in Evanston.  Evanston is located along Lake Michigan, and is approximately 30 minutes north of downtown Chicago.  Evanston is decidedly suburban and Northwestern has a beautiful campus, and balancing that with convenient access to Chicago makes location a core strength of the school.

Academics

Each student takes a core curriculum, and may waive certain courses if he/she has substantial academic or professional background in the course material.  Waiver exams are offered before classes begin.  There is a balance between trying to waive courses to free up taking electives, versus ensuring that you’ll know the material cold before applying core concepts to more advanced courses.  Here has been my class schedule thus far, with a few comments on courses geared for people looking at business school:

-Leadership in Organizations (core class, pre-term)

Fall Quarter

-Accounting (core)

-Marketing (core)

-Statistics and Probability (core) – combined two quarters into one after taking a waiver exam à resulted in more work but freed up an elective

-Strategy (core)

Winter Quarter

-Finance I/II (core) – combined Finance I and Finance II into one quarter to take finance electives in the spring

-Health Care Economics (elective)

-Operations (core) – waived Microeconomics core course which freed up a spot to take Operations in the winter instead of the spring à enables taking upper-level Operations course in the spring

-Strategy and Organization (elective)

Golf

I am fortunate to be an officer in the Kellogg Golf Club, a student organization that facilitates opportunities for groups of Kellogg students to play.  Sadly I only had time to golf twice in the fall, but am hoping to ramp that up in the spring, as there are many nice courses in the area.  There is a Ryder Cup style format between Kellogg and Booth (University of Chicago’s business school), and very much look forward to competing in that event.

Classmates

The people here are phenomenal.  Very hard-working, studious, driven, yet extremely approachable and caring.  A great deal of the evaluation at Kellogg is based on group work, and people are very collaborative academically, with recruiting preparation, and socially.  40% of the student body is international, which is a great way of gaining exposure to different cultures and perspectives on global issues.