Humans of Kellogg: Sam Olmsted (E&W, ’27) Serves the Dish
By: Vidhur Potluri, Director of Finance & Sponsorships & Incoming VP of Digital
Business school can sometimes feel like a place where everyone is practicing their answers.
“Tell me about yourself.”
“Why Kellogg?”
“What do you want to do next?”
Sam Olmsted became interested in the opposite side of the equation: asking the questions instead.
Before Kellogg, Sam spent fifteen years in New Orleans building a career in digital marketing, business development, and media. Along the way, he discovered that interviews had a strange kind of power—the right question could turn networking into real conversation, small talk into honesty, and strangers into people you actually remembered.
That instinct eventually became Kellogg Dishes, a student interview TikTok series that now doubles as one of the most authentic windows into life at Kellogg.
From New Orleans to Evanston
Sam went to Tulane for undergrad, fell in love with New Orleans, and never really left. He spent the bulk of his career at Online Optimism, a digital marketing firm where he worked his way from SEO specialist up to Managing Director.
“I was doing a lot of schmoozing,” he tells The Kelloggian. “Getting out in the city, meeting people, honing my networking skills.” He joined boards, did press, spoke at conferences, and over time, he became very comfortable being in front of people. Somewhere along the way, the agency launched a podcast, and Sam realized that a platform didn’t just build an audience—it created access to people you’d never otherwise get to sit down with. “When you had a platform, you could really reach people that you wouldn’t normally have a chance to reach,” he says.
New Orleans has healthcare, hospitality, law it doesn’t have, at least not in the same way Chicago does, the kind of corporate environment where you can climb in marketing or business development. After eight-plus years at Online Optimism, Sam felt he’d hit a ceiling, and if he was going to move to a bigger market anyway, it made sense to level up his education at the same time. He applied to Kellogg and the rest is history.
The one wrinkle was that he arrived a quarter late. Admitted in October and unable to defer, he took his first quarter virtually from New Orleans (he’s an E&W Student after all) before moving up in March 2025. By the time he arrived on campus, everyone else had already formed the invisible social bonds that tend to solidify in those first few weeks of business school. “I felt like I had missed those initial introductions with my cohort,” he says. “I wasn’t immediately getting the social connection I was hoping for.” He needed a way in.
And he found one.
The Dish
Kellogg Dishes started because Sam was selfish. His words, not mine. “I wanted to know them,” he says about his classmates. The name itself carries two meanings. On the surface, it’s about conversation—classmates “dishing” on classes, careers, and what life at Kellogg actually looks like from the inside. But for Evening & Weekend students, there’s a second layer: Kellogg Table, the complimentary dinner served at the Chicago campus before evening classes, where E&W students decompress after commuting straight from work.
The spark came from a fellow Kellogg student, Drexler Tanner (E&W), who runs a podcast called Get to B-School. Sam reached out to him cold on LinkedIn—just a straightforward message asking if he could be on the show—and Tanner said yes.
When Sam saw the clips back from that interview, something clicked. “I can really do this,” he remembers thinking. He decided TikTok would be the best platform, where the algorithm could drive reach, and he could edit everything on his phone during his 30-minute train commute, turning dead time into a skill he was actively building. He started with friends as guinea pigs to get his questions and framing right, and then a few restaurant recommendation videos started to pop off, pulling in a wider audience before he became more methodical about scheduling proper interviews.
When I asked him to walk me through what a typical film shoot actually looks like, he described something almost deceptively simple: reach out to a classmate over Slack, send a couple of example videos so they know what they’re walking into, meet on the 4th floor at 5:30 p.m., and show up with a tripod and microphones that fit entirely in a backpack.
He also never shares the questions in advance. “I really don’t prepare people at all,” he says. “I like off-the-cuff responses, and my questions are really not that difficult.” 8-12 minutes of conversation yields 10-20 usable clips, and then he’s on the train home, editing on his phone the whole way.
When I asked him about the most surprising conversation he’d had so far, he said: Akylah Cox, a full-time worker, part-time Kellogg student, and travel creator behind @GoKylahGo, a TikTok account with around 40K followers built around day trips and making the most out of limited PTO.
Another classmate, Ryan Fox (E&W), surprised him in a quieter way—Sam had no idea that Fox had moved up from Georgia, that he had two kids, or that his own relocation story mirrored Sam’s in ways that had simply never come up in between classes. “You can dive so much deeper with someone than you would just talking before class,” he says. “The interview gives you a structure to really get to know people.” Coming up next is Professor Craig Wortmann, his Entrepreneurial Selling professor, and Sam is clearly excited about it.
The Marketing Mind Behind the Camera
There’s something worth pausing on here: a person who spent a career building brands for other companies deciding—at business school, of all places—to build one for his classmates instead. The instinct is the same as it’s always been for Sam: find the story, find the platform, find the audience that needs to hear it. The difference now is that the story is right across the table from him.
When I asked him what he hopes people take away from watching Kellogg Dishes, he gave two answers. The first was personal: “I hope people say, I know this guy”—not just that they recognize someone from a video, but that they actually feel like they understand who that person is. The second was broader: people considering Kellogg, thinking about moving to Chicago, or trying to get a real sense of what the MBA experience feels like beyond rankings and brochures. A classmate talking honestly about the class they’re most excited about, or why they chose Kellogg over everywhere else, is harder to fake than a glossy campus tour.
Kellogg has fed into the project in ways he didn’t fully anticipate—the class Selling Yourself and Your Ideas has been, as he puts it, “very translatable” for someone whose whole challenge is convincing strangers to sit in front of a camera, and C-Suite and Boardroom Dynamics has given him a different lens for the conversations he’s having on camera.
When I asked him about the biggest surprise at Kellogg overall, he described it as a double-edged sword: how overwhelming the sheer volume of activities could be, so many things to sign up for that he sometimes felt paralyzed. But the flip side was that there’s always something worth showing up to. Last week, he went to a Saturday pop-up on impact investing, not his area at all, just something that sounded interesting. That curiosity is the same thing that got him here in the first place.
What Comes Next
Sam is already thinking carefully about what happens to Kellogg Dishes after graduation. One option is to hand it off to another Kellogg student who wants to carry it forward, keeping the classmate-to-classmate spirit intact. Another is to pivot toward alumni stories, though the logistics get complicated fast once you’re no longer on campus with people in a fixed place before class each week. The model he keeps coming back to is Get to B-School, the same show that gave him his original lightbulb moment—a format with a clear audience and a life that extends well beyond any one cohort. “I want someone to watch it and say, Kellogg is the right place for me—I can tell based on the attitudes, the jobs, the classes,” he says. Not a time capsule. A window that stays open.
When I asked him what advice he’d give to anyone considering an MBA, his answer was simpler than you’d expect from someone with fifteen years of marketing instincts behind him: don’t over-plan it. A cold LinkedIn message to a classmate with a podcast, a Slack message to a classmate he just wanted to know. That’s how Kellogg Dishes started, and that’s how most good things do.
I saved one question for the end—the same one he asks every interviewee: what are you looking forward to? His answer: getting married in New Orleans over Halloween weekend. Something tells me he won’t be shy for the camera then either. Read About More Humans of Kellogg:
Humans of Kellogg: Julia Loverde (E&W), Founder, ChickyDough Christina Chang (E&W), Strategy & Business Development at Lockheed Martin 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 (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
