Humans of Kellogg: Chase Mlnarik (2Y ‘26): From the Cockpit to the Classroom

By: Tejas Niphadkar, Staff Writer

Chase, in uniform

Ask Chase Mlnarik (2Y ‘26) why he joined the Marine Corps, and he’ll give you an answer that is deeply honest. “The uniforms,” he says, without much hesitation. “They just looked so cool.”

He was a sophomore in high school, watching his older sister get commissioned as a Navy nurse, surrounded by Marines in their dress blues. He was 17. He made a mental note. A few years later, he was one of them.

It would be easy to dismiss that origin story as shallow but spend any time with Chase and you realize the self-deprecating framing is strategic. It’s how he disarms a room. Underneath it is something more considered: a guy who grew up watching his father lace his combat boots in the pre-dawn dark of a Minnesota kitchen who understood early that the military was serious and demanding and noble, and who chose it anyway. Not because he was told to but because something in it called to him.

Chase grew up in Minnesota, the youngest of four, in a household where military life was ambient rather than loud. His father had been a Marine jet pilot, a test pilot, and someone who had once contemplated applying to NASA. By the time Chase came around, his dad was out of active duty and working as a financial advisor, studying for certifications in the basement at night. But he was still in the reserves, which meant that every so often, Chase would wake up early and find him in the kitchen, pulling on his camouflage uniform before heading out.

“As a kid, everything is just normal,” Chase says. “I was just like, ‘okay, yeah, see you, Dad.’” He never thought of it as strange. It was only later, growing up in a state without much of a military presence that he started to notice how other people reacted with a kind of amazed curiosity that made the whole thing feel, actually, kind of cool.

His parents never pushed the military on any of their kids. Every November, his dad’s Marine friends would gather at the house to celebrate the Marine Corps birthday, a tradition that felt entirely natural to Chase growing up and only later registered as unusual. 

His mom, a stay-at-home parent who held the household together across his dad’s transitions, was supportive without being prescriptive. “They never once said we should go into the military,” Chase recalls. “We all came to it on our own.” And they did. His dad, his sister the Navy nurse, his brother-in-law. Chase, eventually, as a Marine aviator. A family that kept finding itself drawn back to the same call.

Chase attended Notre Dame as an undergraduate on an ROTC scholarship, where he managed to simultaneously be a full college student and a future military officer. He stayed out late, woke up at 4am for physical training, and somehow managed to make it work. “As a young kid, you can do it,” he says. “I don’t know how, but you do.” 

What cemented the Marine Corps specifically, beyond the uniforms and his father’s example, was something about their ethos that appealed to a kid who had generally liked the idea of being part of the best. Where the Army tells you it will help you become all you can be, the Marines take a different stance: we don’t think you can do this. Prove us wrong. “That selection,” Chase says, “pulls in exactly the kind of person who’s motivated by a challenge.” He is, he will freely admit, an adrenaline junkie. The message found the right audience.

During ROTC, Aviation Week put him in the cockpit of a military trainer for fifteen minutes. Many loops, rolls, and significant Gs later, and he came out knowing exactly what he wanted. His father had been a jet pilot. Chase, too, would be a jet pilot. He applied for an aviation contract, passed the spatial reasoning tests and medical evaluations, and graduated with a guaranteed flight school slot—though he did not get jets. “That was pretty devastating,” he says. “It felt like my entire life’s dream was just gone.” 

His response to this setback was to sign up for a marathon as a coping mechanism, which he then trained for while simultaneously beginning helicopter school. This is fairly representative of how Chase handles adversity.

The helicopter he eventually flew was the UH-1Y Huey, and if you close your eyes and picture a Vietnam-era helicopter, you are more or less picturing his aircraft. Updated since then, obviously, but iconically the same silhouette. It shoots, transports people, does command and control. A jack-of-all-trades, fast and nimble. Chase loved it. 

Chase was stationed in San Diego, spent five years with his squadron, and did another three years as an active duty instructor training reserve pilots before deciding it was time to leave. Ten years total. Two deployments. The first took him to Okinawa, Japan, then onto Navy ships through Southeast Asia, Thailand, and Guam, flying over places most people only know from maps. He describes the last flight of that deployment with a particular quiet. “Just a perfect flight,” he says. “Super fun. And you build these bonds with the people you serve that are really hard to explain.” He trails off in a way that makes clear the words are not quite getting there.

He had proposed to his JV, Annie, before that first deployment. The couple met at Notre Dame in their senior year, a little late in the game, stayed close while she went to med school in DC and he did infantry training nearby, then decided to try long distance when he left for flight school in Florida. They made it work. She matched with her residency in San Diego. He was already there. They were together in the same city for seven years before Kellogg finally brought them to Chicago. 

The wedding, though, did not go as planned. They had booked a hotel, invited a large crowd, set the date for April 2020. Then COVID arrived. You know  the story: they pushed to August, certain things would have improved by then. Things did not improve. They ended up with a small backyard ceremony with immediate family, followed by a proper celebration on the exact same date a year later. Two weddings: one intimate, one a blowout. “Not fun to organize at the time,” Chase laughs. “But great.”

Now they have two daughters, ages three and one and a half, and Chase is finishing his MBA at Kellogg. He describes fatherhood with a simplicity that somehow lands harder than anything elaborate would. “Being a dad is the coolest thing. I think it’s the coolest thing anyone can do.” Hearing this after a description of his own father—the pre-dawn kitchen, the camouflage uniform, the quiet normalcy of a life organized around service—it’s hard not to notice the echo. He describes his own parenting as similar to his dad’s: lots of love alongside clear structure and firm boundaries, the same framework that once felt strict and unfair to a teenager in Minnesota and now, from the other side, looks exactly like the right one.

Chase came to Kellogg wanting what he had largely missed out on at Notre Dame: a genuine academic experience. He also wanted a reset. “The military is long hours and a lot of work,” he says. “I wanted a break.” The two-year MBA, he figured, would sit well alongside what the Marine Corps had built in him—the soft-skill leadership, the decision-making under pressure, the instinct toward action—while giving him business fundamentals and a professional network for whatever came next. What comes next is renewable energy, utility-scale wind, solar and storage projects. A different kind of mission, different metrics, but the same underlying orientation: find something worth doing, figure out how to do it well.

He is, in the meantime, the Kellogg student who can walk you through the difference between a Huey and a Cobra helicopter, who genuinely enjoyed infantry training in the woods of Northern Virginia, and who once threw a live hand grenade and describes the experience as “interesting.” He is not a monolith, and he does not want to be treated like one. “Even within the military,” he says, “each individual has had vastly different experiences. It’s not some single shared thing. If you have questions, just ask. We love talking about it.”

He says it the way he says most things: openly, without performance, like someone who stopped needing the story to come out a particular way and found, to his mild surprise, that it came out pretty well regardless.

Chase Mlnarik (MBA ’26) is pursuing a career in renewable energy project development. He lives in Chicago with his wife and two daughters.

Read About More Humans of Kellogg: E&W Student Katie McCarthy, Chief of Staff to the CEO, GoFundMe Paige Kotecki (E&W, Kroger) and Ryan Kitchel (E&W, PepsiCo) Chevy Chen (Kellogg E&W) United Airlines Radhika Jajoo (2Y ‘26): Raised by a Village of Women Isabelle Hofgaertner (2Y '26), Former Nike Intern Thomas Reinhart (a JV who's a Boothie!) Keanan Crasto (2Y '27): The JV Who's Basically Doing Kellogg Twice John Gilmore (JV)