Ranking Condiments
Updated: Sep 28
By: Rohan Kumar
I used to tell families on my college tours that starting school was strange, which was probably not what admissions wanted. You’re supposed to tell everyone how amazing everything is. I’ve always had a hard time selling something without acknowledging the awkward or lonely part first. Otherwise, the good part means less.
That was how I felt before KWEST Germany last year. Starting business school already felt strange enough, and now I had agreed to fly across the Atlantic to spend a week with twenty strangers.
I was pretty quiet until we landed. The night before, I had asked ChatGPT for icebreaker questions in case I ran out of things to say.
Nothing says effortless human connection quite like conducting advance research on how to make friends.
Fortunately, I didn’t need the list for long. KWEST keeps everyone’s backgrounds secret until Big Reveal, so you can’t fall back on “Where did you go to school?” or “What did you do before Kellogg?” Pretty quickly, you’re ranking condiments and hearing life stories that probably wouldn’t come up if everyone could retreat to discussing consulting firms. By Big Reveal, my group had somehow correctly guessed that I worked in crypto, which made me quietly reconsider what exactly about my personality had screamed “cryptocurrency.”
In Hamburg, I was voluntold to lead our group through a haunted house despite hating haunted houses, so I did the only responsible thing and made my 5’4” friend Emily walk in front of me. I also learned that one guy on the trip had lived less than 100 feet from me in New York. We went to the same bodega and barber and had apparently needed to fly all the way to Germany to meet.
By the time we got back to Evanston, these weren’t people I was nervous to talk to anymore. We went to karaoke and then moved the night to E2, because apparently a week together hadn’t been enough. Some of my closest friends at Kellogg came from that trip. I know that’s the line everyone writes about KWEST. It also happens to be true.
I didn’t come back from Germany with some profound lesson about saying yes. I was just really glad I had gone.
After a few months, saying no had gotten easy. Evanston was freezing, my apartment was cozy, and I already had friends elsewhere. The less I went out, the fewer people I knew, and the easier it was to stay home. I had this nagging feeling that I was watching Kellogg happen from slightly outside it.
Around then, Joey called me. He was my first close friend at business school, and he and three people from KWEST Armenia needed a fifth KWEST leader for Chile. He asked if I wanted in, and I said yes immediately.
“Whoa. I thought I was going to have to convince you or something.”
I knew Joey well but barely knew the other three leaders. I had agreed to help twenty strangers feel comfortable with each other while quietly worrying I was the add-on in my own group. By August, after months of planning together, I had stopped thinking about it.
At breakfast, just three hours after we arrived, one of our KWESTees, Justin, became “Papi.” I don’t remember there being a vote or much discussion. He was Justin, then he was Papi, and that was that.
Our tour guide became “Mom.” By the end, she was at karaoke with us singing “My Way” by Frank Sinatra (not the Fetty Wap version, to our slight disappointment).
One day we had a rough bus ride into the Andes, followed by a hike that was cold, windy, and raining sideways.At one point I was sharing my poncho with another person. If twenty people were ever going to get cranky with each other, this was the day. Instead, they spent the whole way up and back down making jokes and asking each other questions.We ended up packed into a small cottage sharing what might have been the best soup we’d ever had. Nobody, and very little soup, got left behind.
We saw smaller versions of that all week: someone noticing when a person had drifted to the edge of a conversation and pulling them back in. A lot of what we had worried about as leaders, they were just handling themselves.
On our last night in Chile, one of the KWESTees came up to me and asked, “Were you actually friends with your KWEST leaders after your trip? Because I really want to stay friends with you guys.”
I told him I was. The question stuck with me because a year earlier, I had been on the other side of it. I had gone into Germany hoping I’d come out with friends. Now one of our KWESTees was asking whether we might be some of those people for him.
The next day, after we dropped everyone off at the airport, someone sent the leaders a video of the KWESTees sitting together, laughing and ordering terremotos, the Chilean drink that translates to “earthquake.”The trip was over and we weren’t organizing anything anymore. They were still sitting together because they wanted to be.
Leading KWEST didn’t suddenly turn me into someone who says yes to everything. I still say no plenty. And I don’t think anyone should blindly sell Kellogg, or KWEST, or really anything else.
But Joey called at a pretty good time.
I’m very glad he did.
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