The MBA Birthday: A Social Case Study

Cathy Campo
Apr 26
3 min read

By: Sammy Tartell, Staff Writer

Sometime around the new year, I realized that my birthday was coming up, and I had a problem. Not a logistical problem… more of an existential one.

I've done birthdays before and know how they work: you text your people, you pick a bar, someone makes a cake… it's nice. But this year, my people were different. I had only been in Evanston for one quarter. I knew everyone and no one at the same time—a phenomenon that only business school can produce. We'd done cases together, complained about recruiting, experienced enough happy hours to know each other's drink orders, though maybe not each other's middle names.

And so, naturally, I treated it like a project.

I created a Partiful. I designed custom lighters. I roped in a friend to co-host so we could pool our social networks and hit a critical mass. We booked a private room at a bar that I can only describe as being in the middle of nowhere, paid a deposit that made me briefly reconsider the whole thing, and then spent the entire night refreshing the bar tab to make sure we hit the minimum. This, apparently, is what birthdays look like in business school: you project manage them. But here's the amazing thing: it actually worked—and not just logistically.

At some point in the night, I looked around the room and noticed that I was surrounded by people I genuinely liked, some whom I'd known for years, and some whom I'd met maybe four or so times. But it didn't feel like a networking event or a forced social occasion… it felt like a party, and a good one at that!

I've thought about why that surprised me. I think it's because there's something about MBA life that lends itself to multiple personas and always keeps you somewhat off-kilter. In many ways, we’re always performing, even if just a little, a version of who we are. It could be the elevator pitch version, the club bio version, the first impression at a happy hour version, but your birthday cuts through all that. It's yours. And people show up for it in a way that's decidedly unambiguous.

There's also something poignant about aging in this environment. Something that hits home just a little differently.

Everyone here is acutely aware of time—if, for no other reason, we took two years out of our careers and lives to be here. We create plans that are prefaced by "when I graduate." Birthdays, in that context, feel oddly ominous; another year has incredible significance when you're in a place where everyone is trying to figure out what the next one should look like.

But standing in that bar at midnight, having had perhaps one drink too many, watching someone hold up a lighter with my face on it, I felt something simpler than all that: I felt lucky. Lucky to be here, lucky that people came, and particularly lucky that the bar tab math worked out.

My first MBA birthday was a case study in overthinking something that ended up being exactly what it needed to be. The planning mattered, but it also didn't. The lighters were a hit. The room was in the middle of nowhere. And it was the best birthday I'd had in a long time, partly because of all the people who showed up, and partly because, for one night, I stopped thinking about what came next.