The Kellogg Trek: From Crucible Moments to Convocation

By: Anonymous

My first few days at Kellogg felt like stepping into a hypercapitalist wet dream, a post-racial, post-class utopia where the dissimilarities of our cultural backgrounds and identities seemed to dissolve under the equalizing logic of the market — viscerally felt and communicated through the democratized language of “stakeholder alignment” and  “customer segmentation.” We were instructed to share our deepest secrets through the form of “crucible” moments with the strangers who would become our closest friends (and LinkedIn endorsements). Had elite higher education really cracked the code on human connection? Perhaps this place, designed to manufacture leaders at scale, was also a kind of social miracle. 

Paul Revere

Our MORS professors relayed the tale of Paul Revere, who helped launch the American Revolution by spreading the news that the British had come. His contemporary, William Dawes, made the same midnight ride from Boston — but he was stuck in an echo chamber, warning people who already knew each other. Revere, on the other hand, was an information “broker”: he moved between groups, passing the message to people who wouldn’t have heard it otherwise. According to official statistics, Kellogg’s Class of 2026 is 50% women, 40% international, 11% LGBTQ+, and 10% first-generation graduate students. For the class of 2025, 42% of the domestic population were U.S. students of color. It’s a cohort that seemed strategically optimized for building Revere-like networks. 

But at some point, something shifted. Maybe it was the unforgiving Chicago transition from fall to winter, or maybe it was always going to happen. Regardless, it seemed that people slowly started drifting back into what felt easy. Maybe, for the Moncler-donned heirs of private equity giants—home really is with those who weekend in Courcheval; being blonde and blue-eyed makes it easier for members of such groups to instantly identify each other in a crowded room at CIM. Or maybe, if this is your first time in the U.S., there’s no reason to speak in English because there are enough people who speak your native language. Maybe there’s nothing the culturally confused diaspora can offer that you don’t already have. On a more serious note, maybe it’s much more complex and deep: older than any of that—it’s about history and lineage; and generations of exclusion that explain why you feel most at ease with the people who just get it. 

What is a community, anyway? To what extent do the groups that we belong to define our individual identity? At what point does adaptation start to feel like self-erasure? The political historian Benedict Anderson famously described nations as “imagined communities,” held together not by direct relationships, but by symbols, stories, and shared language. Most people will never meet each other, and yet they believe, deeply, in the fiction of commonality. But the imagination starts to fray when it no longer reflects material reality—when the image of unity obscures the fractures underneath. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt might say this is inevitable: humans are evolved for tribalism; a vestige of a primal instinct to seek safety under attack. And then there’s the postmodern cultural theorists, who posit a “third space,” an unstable, negotiated zone that emerges when cultural identities collide. It’s neither assimilation nor purity but something else entirely: contradictory, improvised, a place where categories start to break down and something new tries to form. For the record: these are tough questions—arguments about identity politics (and Azealia Banks’s latest tweets) seem to make up 90% of my X feed.

But maybe community isn’t the point. I feel that my inner world seems to expand every time I talk to someone new. Each act of building a relationship is like assembling a collage: a mutual effort to draw out the unexpected parts of ourselves. Perhaps jagged and discordant at certain points, but still something beautiful. At times, it can be disorienting: if you’re always code-switching, what part of you is even real? Still, there’s something deeply satisfying about the attempt — the act of reaching across difference, of exploring the contours of someone else’s mind. As American poet Walt Whitman wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Or, as our modern equivalent said, “I’m a boss in a skirt, I’m a dog, I’m a flirt," (Cardi B.).

So, as the end of our time at Kellogg is on the horizon, perhaps the most important skill we’ve learned isn’t how to optimize a go-to-market plan or do a DCF, but rather the uncomfortable and difficult effort to trek the terrain of harsh and unknown landscapes while keeping your feet on the ground. Maybe community isn’t something you find – but something you piece together, moment by moment, across the gaps. Not seamless or symmetrical, but still—like Paul Revere’s midnight tour through the northeastern corridor—something that holds.