Swan Song: A Farewell to The Kelloggian, and to MBAi ‘26

Cathy Campo
Mar 29
5 min read

By: Siddhaarth Sudhakaran, Staff Writer

*The MBAi '26 batch during our core Operations class*

There is an ancient, and slightly morbid, legend: that a swan, otherwise silent its entire life, sings one breathtaking song just before it dies. The swan song. The final flourish—impossibly beautiful precisely because it is the last.

I have been writing for The Kelloggian for a while now. And as I sit down to write this last piece, I find myself wondering: is this my swan song? Will these words arrive with some rare, luminous quality that I have never conjured before?

I am not the swan in this story. My prose has always had the approximate elegance of a panda attempting to parallel park. But the subject of this piece is absolutely worthy of a swan song. If I can manage even a pale approximation of the respect it deserves, I'll consider this well-written.

The subject, of course, is the MBAi batch of 2026.

Not A Cult. Probably.

So what exactly is MBAi? The guesses are always entertaining. A cult? (Defensible. We have strong opinions about everything from the appeal of Malört to the morality of capitalism.) A backup option for people who didn't get into the 2Y program? (No, and I've developed a very patient smile for when people ask.) Some kind of super-degree with two diplomas and a superiority complex?

Here's the simple version: MBAi is a joint program between Kellogg and the McCormick School of Engineering. One degree—an MBA, awarded by both schools—with a heavier load of core classes and a harder lean into technology. This year's cohort is 49 students. It’s small enough that everyone knows everyone; it’s Large enough, as it turns out, to be a genuine menace on party nights.

The Accidental Magic of Structure

Here's something I've come to believe with complete honesty: the structure of the MBAi program might be the single best way to experience Kellogg.

We begin alongside the 2Y cohort, stumbling through the same bewildering first weeks of case discussions and cold calls. We aren't relegated to a separate bubble (ahem, unlike our friends in the MMM program, whom we will not dwell on, but we wish well)

*MBAi’s on Halloween '26. We aren’t beating the cult allegations, are we?*

Then something else happens. Because we share so many core classes together, we keep finding each other—again and again, across marketing and operations and software architecture and product management. In a program as large as Kellogg, most connections get one good conversation before the current sweeps you apart. MBAi gave us twenty. It gave us permission—to be awkward, to be “cringe,” to be unfinished—and enough grace to find each other through those moments. Stephanie Larar (MBAi ’26), the cohort’s resident fashionista and AI Club co-president called joining MBAi "hands down the best decision" she’s ever made.

GymBAi, GolfBAi, BrunchBAi, and Other Evidence of Civilization

Every community worth its name has rituals. Ours accrued organically, the way all good traditions do. One of our earliest acquired traditions that we dutifully carried out till the end were monthly birthday parties. Worth Goodell (MBAi '26) bakes cakes. From scratch. For people's birthdays. Every month. Over time, these parties became a kind of clock—a monthly ritual I found myself looking forward to, quietly curious what he'd come up with next.

If NBC’s Friends have the Central Perk coffee shop, and How I Met Your Mother has MacLaren’s Pub, then we have Stacked and Folded, the restaurant-bar on Noyes which became our watering hole. A rotating group of MBAis has gathered there more or less weekly since sometime in first year. There is GyMBAi—a group of MBAis who go to the gym together regularly, which I admire enormously and participate in inconsistently. There are quarterly retreats, and then there is MBAi-Island: a yearly escape to somewhere warm. This year: Puerto Rico.

Sam Kim (MBAi ’26), the quiet engine behind most of what makes MBAi social life actually happen, described the whole journey with concise erudition of a veteran: "Great education and opportunities. Even better people!"

One classmate put it another way: she plans to show her kids the WhatsApp community someday—all those group chats named GymBAi, GolfBAi, BrunchBAi—not just as proof that they had fun, but that they built something real. People to depend on, to celebrate with. People to cry with, when that was what the moment needed.

*MBAi Whatsapp community names (Please don’t judge our naming conventions)*

The anthropologist Margaret Mead once said that the first sign of true civilization wasn't a tool or a weapon—it was a healed human femur. A bone that broke and mended meant someone had stayed, fed another person, protected them, and waited for them to recover. I think about that when I think about what I experienced as a part of MBAi. Param Desai (MBAi '26) describes it well: “No matter how relentless things got, there was always someone to turn to—for interview prep, for a shoulder to lean or just to breathe. From MBAi-Island to weekly happy hours, from showing up at each other's events to helping the incoming class find their footing, the community of 50 always showed up.” That, he said, is what made it feel like home.

A Safe Harbor at Sea

I grew up in the narrow bylanes of a sleepy neighborhood on the outskirts of Chennai, India in the kind of place where the outside world arrived slowly, if at all. We had no bookstores. Instead, we had pseudo “libraries”—cramped storefronts stocked with discarded books shipped from abroad. They were old paperbacks with American home addresses penciled inside the front flap with dates going back to the sixties. That's where I found Mark Twain and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. And what lodged itself in me wasn't the plot—it was the feeling. The wide-open Midwest, the Mississippi running endless and unhurried, the sense that life was large and available to anyone willing to show up for it. Freedom as a birthright. Belonging as a given.

*MBA”Island” '26 – San Juan, Puerto Rico. Author on left, striped shirt*

I carried that version of America in my head for twenty years. When I finally came here for graduate school, some part of me was still chasing that feeling I'd first glimpsed in that borrowed, water-stained paperback. And then, improbably, I found it—in a cohort of 49 people, more than half of whom weren't American at all.

Kellogg is vast, and for someone settling into a new country, vastness can feel overwhelming. What MBAi gave me was a harbor. Not a shelter from the ocean, but a place to anchor before heading back out into it. A small, specific, deeply human community inside a larger one, that embodied the very best of what it means to be a Kellogg leader.

I did not expect this when I applied. I would not trade it for the world.

Goodbye On Behalf of the Cohort

To the Kellogg community, to the students and professors and staff who made these two years what they were: on behalf of the entire MBAi cohort, we'll miss you more than a closing paragraph can adequately express.

We'll be back in June for graduation. But until then, I guess this is goodbye.

*The MBAi batch with their JVs at the farewell party (Yearbooks pictured on the table)*