The Curriculum (and Spirit!) That Followed Me Home from the Kellogg Global Hub

By: Trendy Tan One year out and Kellogg keeps showing up “uninvited”… in the best way possible.

It's been almost a year since I wrapped up my exchange quarter at Kellogg, and I still talk about it to anyone willing to listen. Ask my friends. Ask my husband. Ask anyone who's made the mistake of sitting next to me at a dinner party and mentioning anything even remotely related to energy markets, healthcare, negotiation, or even (dare I say it) U.S. politics, because I'll invariably find a way to bring it back to Kellogg.

A few weeks ago, I attended an event on sustainability procurement, an industry completely new to me. Somehow, I wasn’t just nodding along but was holding my own with commodities veterans, thanks to Professor Busse's class on The Economics of Energy Markets and the Environment. I took that course out of curiosity, never expecting it to resurface at a Singapore roundtable a year later.

Who knew Prescriptive Analytics could be fun? Honestly almost dropped the class, but Dalal Aldilaimi inspired me to stay and tough out what became a major highlight of the term.

It happened again late last year when my husband started talking shop with his colleagues. Thanks to Anton Braverman’s Decision Models and Prescriptive Analytics class, I had just enough grounding in optimization problems to actually keep pace in a room full of PhD scientists.

Then there was a healthcare case competition held back home in Singapore just as the quarter was coming to an end. I’d entered Professor Timothy Calkins' Biomedical Marketing class as an industry outsider, but his frameworks became my ultimate cheat code and carried me all the way to the finals.

Even the class where I was most out of my depth left a mark. Watching Professor Nicolas Crouzet land from an early morning flight and walk into our 8:30am Macroeconomic Policy and Global Capital Markets class with slides incorporating the previous night's news? That kind of energy stays with you.

And then there's Professor Victoria Medvec, whose talks I crashed even though I wasn't officially her student. After just two sessions, I walked away with a negotiation mindset (or at least, the beginning of one).

But honestly? The best parts weren't always on the syllabus.

The #hot_takes Slack channel. Where the real education happens.

On some days, there were up to seven student-run lunch-and-learns to choose from in the same one-hour slot. Coming from a system where one or two events every couple of days was the norm, the optionality was mind-boggling. The FOMO was constant with social events, conversations, and opportunities all unfolding at once.

That vibrant school spirit showed up in smaller ways too: making it to at least one SGD (Small Group Dinner) to finally understand the hype, watching wildly talented classmates take on ‘the school that must not be named’ at The Battle of the Bands, and, of course, Special K!…where I may or may not have liberated a playbill as a souvenir.

Then there's Loraine Hasebe, my Kellogg career coach, whose advice opened opportunities I hadn't even thought to look for, and still influences how I think about my career today.

There’s the community of fellow exchange students from all over the world, swapping stories and sharing the surreal experience of an MBA abroad. Then there are the Singaporeans at Kellogg, who somehow found me and invited me to Six Flags. And in a wonderfully full-circle moment, that same active student community is why I'm writing this piece at all—it was at a coffee tasting session hosted by a classmate that I first met Cathy Campo, co-founder of this very publication.

The exchange cohort that turned Evanston into a second home, alongside Allison LeClere, our dedicated program director and the heart of our international student experience.

An exchange quarter is a strange, compressed, wonderful thing. I had arrived in Evanston slightly jet-lagged and anxious, having left my seven-month-old back home in Singapore. But thanks to an incredibly supportive husband, I was determined to make every minute count.

You don't expect a procurement event to make you glad you took an energy economics elective. You don't expect a negotiations talk to quietly become a personal philosophy. And you definitely don't expect the Kellogg spirit to follow you 9,000 miles home.

About the Author: Trendy Tan (NUS MBA '25) is a marketing strategist who still hasn't quite left the Global Hub mentally. She is currently based back home, where her husband has officially reached his lifetime quota for "When I was in Evanston..." stories. Read More: Passport to Evanston: Meet Kellogg's Exchange Students