The Least Strategic Parts

By: Risha Dewan

There is something strange about Kellogg that I don’t think I fully understood until now.

Most adult life moves toward permanence. Careers solidify. Friend groups shrink. People slowly become more fixed versions of themselves. By a certain age, there is an unspoken expectation that you should know who you are and where you are headed.

And then there is business school.

Last day of BudaKwest

A place where hundreds of people voluntarily leave behind stable jobs, move across the country or the world, and spend one to two years existing in a strange state of suspension. Everyone arrives mid-transition. Careers changing. Relationships changing. Priorities changing. Entire identities changing. Yet somehow, especially at the beginning, everyone still tries to appear fully formed.

You see it immediately at Kellogg. The polished introductions at Big Reveal during KWEST. The sharing of personal anecdotes during Crucible Moments. The recruiting stories practiced enough times to sound effortless. The pressure to seem ambitious but balanced, confident but humble, social but never trying too hard. Everyone is performing certainty while quietly trying to figure themselves out in real time.

Including me.

I think I spent the beginning of Kellogg trying to seem more certain than I actually felt. More polished. More put together. Like I was going to live the life in the business school essays I wrote about instead of really admitting I had a vague collection of ambition and instincts. I remember sitting in a first-round interview in the winter of First Year for a role I had known, somewhere deep down, wasn’t right for me. It was the wrong industry, the wrong function, maybe even the wrong version of the life I was trying to build. But I had applied anyway, prepared anyway, smiled across the table anyway, because the name looked good and the offer would have felt like proof of something. I got to the second round before I stopped. Not because I had figured anything out. Mostly because I couldn’t keep performing certainty about a future I didn’t actually want.

I came to business school expecting to optimize my life. Find the right internship. Build the right network. Position myself for the future I thought I was supposed to want. We’re set up to believe that’s the point of this place.

But over time, the parts of Kellogg that stayed with me most were usually the least strategic ones: the moments between everything else.

I read something once about how one of the hardest parts of adulthood is that friendship becomes almost entirely self-constructed. There are very few environments left that are intentionally designed to create that closeness. When I first moved to New York City after living in farmland Massachusetts for undergrad, I struggled immensely with finding that sense of community. No dorm rooms. No athletic teams. No built-in routines that force people together long enough to become part of one another’s lives.

And maybe that’s part of why Kellogg, at times, feels so emotionally intense. It temporarily recreates that kind of proximity again.

There is something uniquely disorienting about how quickly people become important to you here. One day someone is just another person in your section (beep bop boop!).  Then suddenly, they are the person whose apartment you instinctively end up at after a long night. The person you text before an interview. The person who knows your coffee order, your relationship problems, your flight anxiety, and the exact look on your face when you are stressed pretending not to be stressed.

And most of it happens accidentally. Through repetition. Through proximity. Through lingering.

For someone who spent most of her life optimizing toward the next thing, lingering did not come naturally to me. I liked efficiency. Productivity. Momentum. Even socially, I think I approached relationships with the same subconscious logic many ambitious people do: maximize the experience and move on to the next thing.

Kellogg quietly disrupted that instinct. Because the best parts of the last two years were almost never efficient. They happened after the planned thing was over. The conversation after dinner when half the table had already left. Walking home in freezing weather (hello Chiberia) because listening to what the other person had to say mattered more than getting home faster. Random Tuesdays where someone casually asked if people wanted to grab a drink and suddenly there was a whole pregame on the E2 patio.

I started realizing that some of the most meaningful parts of life only reveal themselves if you stay past the point of efficiency.

So much of who we became at Kellogg emerged in the hours around everything else. Those were the moments where people stopped performing. The networking voice (yes, we all have one) disappeared. Recruiting scripts faded. People became more honest about their intentions. About uncertainty. About homesickness, burnout, relationships, family illnesses, loneliness, fear of making the wrong choices.

A few weeks ago, I turned 30.

Turning 30

For a while, I treated it like a deadline. As if turning 30 meant I should have become a fully finalized version of myself by now. More certain, more settled. More definitive in my choices and identity. People joke about turning 30 in strange ways, either treating it like the beginning of irrelevance or insisting it is “the new 20” as if aging itself needs a rebrand.

But somewhere during these two years, I stopped letting age feel like a verdict on who I was supposed to be.

I think many of us arrived at Kellogg believing uncertainty was something successful people eventually outgrew. Instead, we found ourselves surrounded by ambitious, impressive people openly questioning careers, relationships, identities, and definitions of success in real time.

At some point, uncertainty stopped feeling like something to solve immediately.

People embraced change openly. Changing careers after years in one industry. Leaving relationships that no longer fit. Becoming softer, louder, calmer, more ambitious, less performative, more themselves. Watching that happen around me made it harder to believe adulthood was supposed to be static.

Recently, I was talking to a close friend from my KWEST about whether these friendships would last in a way people always promise they will. He said something like, “I don’t know if I’ll realistically stay deeply in touch with everyone. It’s not like college; it’s only been two years.”

And maybe that's true.

But then he said something that stayed with me: “I’ll still miss these people. They saw versions of me I didn’t know I had.”

I understood exactly what he meant. There is something powerful about being witnessed during a period of becoming. About having people around for the messy middle of your life, before the story fully makes sense. These were the people who saw one another before internships worked out, before breakups healed, before confidence became real. People watched each other fail, pivot, celebrate, spiral, recover, and slowly grow into themselves.

And I think what surprised me most was what the growth looked like by the end. Early conversations at Kellogg revolved around prestige, compensation, titles, trajectories. By second year, people spoke more openly about balance, relationships, health, purpose, and building lives that actually feel sustainable. There is something strangely comforting about admitting you don’t have a five-year plan, let alone a one-year plan. 

Maybe this is a #hottake, but I’m not sure Kellogg gave most of us clear answers. If anything, it made many of us realize how few answers we actually have. But it did create an environment where people slowly stopped pretending they had everything figured out. Where it became normal to admit uncertainty out loud. And that feels increasingly rare in adulthood.

Part of what made Kellogg feel so intense was the quiet awareness that it was ending the entire time.

You feel it during the first warm day on the lake when everyone suddenly emerges outside at once. During the final weeks of spring quarter when people say “we should do this more often” while realizing there is almost no time left to do it. During the moments at the end of wine nights when people linger a little longer because leaving suddenly feels more emotional than expected.

Celebrating the holidays with some Bots 

There is an odd tenderness to temporary places.

Maybe because people become less guarded when they understand, consciously or not, that this exact version of life will never exist again.

For all the talk of becoming a Kellogg leader and rising to the top, I believe the real lesson of Kellogg was learning how deeply human ambition really is. Beneath all the LinkedIn announcements and polished networking pitches, most people are simply trying to build lives that feel meaningful. Trying to find people who just understand them. Trying to become someone they actually like being.

The irony is that many of the moments I will remember most would look completely insignificant to anyone outside of this experience.

Group chats deciding where to go post pre-game.

Someone saving you a seat in class.

Walking to dinner after watching Special K!

Skipping Tuesday night class to go to a friend’s sushi pop-up.

Splitting an Uber home from downtown Chicago after you vowed to take the Metra.

Going to Ridgeville Tavern twice in one week because there’s nothing open past 8 p.m.

Watching endless episodes of a TV show in someone’s apartment because everyone was too tired to go out.

Standing in a kitchen after a night out, realizing, without really knowing when it happened, that these people had become your life.

That was the real curriculum for me. Not just learning how to think differently but learning that identity is not fixed. That adulthood does not have to mean becoming static. That it is still possible, even later than we expect, to surprise yourself. To change your mind. To rebuild your life. To let people into it more fully.

In two weeks, the Kellogg bubble will end. I keep thinking about what I’m afraid of losing: not the structure, not the convenience, but the particular feeling of being somewhere that made change feel normal. A place where it was okay to not have it figured out. Where uncertainty was something people said out loud instead of hiding.

What I will miss most is the feeling of existing in a place where everyone was given the rare chance to change in front of one another. To be seen before they fully figured themselves out.

To become.

Read Parting Notes from the Class of 2026:

As We Stumble Along The Boy Behind the Smile Kellogg is its People FOHMO: The Fear of Having Missed Out Great Things Start from Small Beginnings 10 Things I Didn't Expect to Get Used to at Kellogg The Shape of Two Years The View Between Graduations