Wow, time has been flying bye!  I’m almost finished with my fourth Quarter @ Kellogg.  I haven’t written about the experience nearly as much as I should have.  I could pin this on a multitude of reasons, but it comes down to the fact that I am a fairly inconsistent blogger

I’m going to try and catch things up quickly, very quickly.

First off, Kellogg is awesome.  The students are great, the workload is manageable and the education is first rate.  This quarter, I’m taking the second of two core statistics courses and microeconomics.  Both of these courses leverage students abilities to work together as the majority of the course work has been team based.  These aren’t exactly what you’d typically consider a shoe-in for team work, but it has actually worked out pretty well.

I’ve found that my classmates are all top notch and that we all work together really well.  In the part-time program, we are all swamped with school, work and some semblance of a life outside of that so we are all in the same boat.  This provides an interesting dynamic as schedules and workloads adjust in each of the different parts of our lives; somehow, we all seem to make it work every time.

For the upcoming quarter, I’m jumping head first into two of my focus areas.  I’ll be taking a course known by the students simply as turbo.  It is a two for one finance course that knocks out two quarters of work in a single quarter.  This of course means lots of work, reading, projects and the like.  I’ll be complimenting the craziness of turbo with a very interesting course on Leading the Strategic Change Process.  This should be a really fun course, and something that is very interesting to me.  I’m looking forward to both of these!

Okay… that is my quick update for now.

They are the classes I started last night @ Kellogg.

Macro was very interesting.  Given the current climate, it must be a tough subject to teach as you almost need to throw the text out the windows.  We are going to focus on the frameworks, bringing in some current events and concepts.  It should be a great class.

I’m not quite sure what the stats course is going to be like.  It is a VERY small class, with only 7 people registered right now.  I received the materials from the professor this morning and have class tonight, so we’ll see how it goes.

So, my second quarter of a Kellogg MBA is getting close to an end.  I’ve titled the post as a mid-term update, but we are actually about 75% done with the Quarter.

This term has been filled with Marketing Management and Organizational Leadership.  Two very interesting courses.  The Organizational Leadership course has been fascinating.  Our professor is a very, very interesting individual and simply loves the topic.  We have been covering social influence, biases, social networking theory and will be touching on negotiations soon.  The workload has been as expected, and seems to be pretty manageable.

Marketing Management has been another very interesting course.  The workload here has been a bit heavier, but again seems managable.  We are doing quite a bit of reading, along with a lot of case work.  The cases have spanned a very wide array of organizations and cover the topics we are studying nicely.

I’ve been very please with the quarter so far.  We had our mid-term “managers pub” where Kellogg picks up the pizza and beer after class.  That was a nice chance to catch up with some folks from the prior quarter.  I’ve been a little light on the out of class events with Ryder growing up so fast and getting pretty involved locally at our church.

Anyhow, that’s the update.  I’ll post more as time allows.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted on my journey to a Kellogg MBA.  I could make a million excuses why, none of them would matter

This was a great quarter.  As I posted earlier, I took two core courses this past quarter, Accounting and Strategy.  Overall I’m pretty darn happy with the results so far.  I don’t have my grades yet, but I feel like we learned quite a bit in both of these classes. 

Here is my quick recap:

Accounting –
Overall impression of this class was very positive.  My Professor did a fantastic job making sense of all of the accounting terminology and the bits and pieces that we covered.  I’ll be honest here, I was not looking forward to this class; however, I did enjoy it.  We covered the basics of accounting, major financial reports (balance sheets, statements of cashflow, income statements etc…), leasing, inventory, basic securities accounting and a few other topics.  I dont’ think that I’ll be taking too many more of these accounting courses, but this was a good overview and will serve me well going forward. I even got a copy of the annual report for a REIT that I have a HUGE position on in one of my retirement accounts… I read through all 150 pages of the stuipd thing and acutally understood most of the mumbo jumbo that they had in there.  Not too shabby!

Strategy –
Overall impression of the proffessor was mixed.  He appeared to me to have a really great grasp of the economics of strategy, he just had a really hard time expressing it and with time management.  We spent a whole lot of time in this class in discussion, which was good; however, I personally would have preferred a little more time teaching the frameworks etc… I’d estimate that over the last 5 courses we had discussions for at least 2-2.5 hours each night, class is only three hours long, so we didn’t average a lot of lecture time after the midterm, when the topics became a little more exapansive…  We covered the basics of strategy including Porters Five Forces and moved into some more interesting topics such as Game Theory and differentiation models.  The class materials provided a good amount of details; I just felt we were missing some of the lecture instruction that would have been very beneficial.  This course really focused on Case work, and I had a strong group to work with.  Thankfully my classmates had some very interesting views on each of the subjects and we were able to have a robust discussion that aided in the learning process.

Generally, the first quarter of Kellogg was a great one.  This is a lot of work and requires a lot of commitment, but the benefits seem to be pretty strong.  I spent quite a bit of time each week working through the reading material and assigned work, but it seems manageable.

Anyhow, for those of you currently attending, feel free to add your thoughts… Until then, I have a few weeks off and I play to take advantage of them!

I’ve been getting a lot of questions from people asking why Kellogg? So here are a few of my reasons:

It is absolutely one of the best schools in the country

Did I mention that Kellogg is one of the absolute best schools in the country? You can qualify this any any numbers of ways, but the fact remains that Kellogg is a fantastic institution. The marketing program (which will be one of my focuses) is second to none, the alumni are top notch, the students are fantastic and my classroom experiance was amazing.

Kellogg has a fantastic focus on leadership and teamwork that is second to none.  This focus on critical elements in our global society gives Kellogg another leg up in my opinion.

Support – Family and Friends

Kellogg has a fantastic support system and that is very important to me.  My family is a critical part of who I am, and I want to make sure my wife (and baby to be) have the support system that is required when we make the trek out to Chicago.

Having a flourishing program like Joint Venture and Significant Connections is very important to me.

Students

These people are smart.  I don’t know exactly how you can quantify the impact of the students on the quality of a program, but the Kellogg students are top notch.  I’m extremely excited to spend some time working together, and learning with the students at Kellogg.

Classroom Expierance

Look, I’m paying a lot of money for this thing.  It better be a great experiance and let me tell you, Kellogg is great!  The team environment is very obvious across the board.  You can see the quality of the people in just a few minutes in the classroom.

Legacy

Oh yeah, my Dad is a Kellogg alumnus… I was born at the NW Hospital… So there is a bit of an emotional tie there

What are you’re reasons?

It’s official. I’ve been accepted to, and will attend, the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University!

It has been a very difficult decision process to figure out which school I will attend. I only applied to the best of the best and have been accepted to multiple top 5 schools.

Over the past month or so, I’ve taken a few trips to the Chicago area to interview for, and attend classes at Kellogg. These class visits really solidified the decision for me.

I was also accepted to the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and had the opportunity to compare the classroom environments of Kellogg and the Chicago GSB on back-to-back evenings. This was a great experience and really helped to make this difficult decision.

So… now that the b-school journey has officially started, I’ll be adding another topic to the blogging mix here at ryanbarr.com.

If you’re an MBA student, or making a decision I’d love to discuss it with you. Drop a comment and lets start up some commentary!

Ryan and I traveled to Chicago last week to accomplish several things. 1) I had never been there. And if I’m gonna live there for a few years, I gotta make sure I like it! 2) Ryan had an interview at Kellogg. 3) He also attended one class at GSB and another class at Kellogg to see which school he liked better. 4) We had the opportunity to meet the guys in the Gallo office.

I’m not a big-city type of gal, so I definitely had my reservations. But truthfully, it wasn’t really all that bad. It appeared to me to be cleaner than San Francisco. It’s also brighter because the streets are wider. And there are less homeless people… That may change once the weather gets warmer, but it was still nice. Our first full day there, we rented a car and drove through a whole bunch of suburbs to get a feel for where we might live, how long the commute to school might be, etc. We liked a lot of the areas we saw… but of course, the farther we got from the city, the more comfortable with the area I became. I came with the expectation that it would be COLD, so the weather was no surprise to me. It wasn’t really as bad as I thought it would be. We were prepared for it, and once you reach your destination, the insides of all the buildings are very warm (sometimes too warm!) so it doesn’t take long to thaw out. One night, we were sitting at dinner in PF Chang’s, and it was lightly snowing outside… very romantic! We also got to walk down to Navy Pier (practically a ghost town during the winter), and I got to walk around downtown Naperville while Ryan was meeting with Gallo. It’s a really cute little area… the first “downtown” I’ve been to with free parking!

Ryan’s Kellogg interview went very well. The admissions gal was very impressed with him, and he came home feeling very confident that he’d be accepted. He really enjoyed the class he sat in on at Kellogg, but the same cannot be said for the class he experienced at GSB. Apparently the professor was great, but the student body was not what he would prefer to be a part of. That kind of sealed the deal for him, and helped him make a decision between the two schools (which previously was quite difficult). All he had to do was wait to hear the results of his application… But he didn’t have to wait long! By the end of the week, he learned that he’d been accepted. Yay!

His meeting with Gallo was also successful. He feels like he’ll get along great with everyone there. The building there in is literally right off the freeway, and it’s beautiful! There’s even a gym and cafeteria on-site, which is quite a plus. After talking with the guys there, we’ve kind of narrowed our living area down to a couple of villages (yes, I said villages!). We’re looking at east Aurora or West Naperville. They butt right up against each other, and are an easy 10-15 minute commute to Gallo, and about 30 minutes from downtown Chicago. There’s a church in the area that we’re interested in trying out, as well as a couple of dance studios and a Stroller Strides. So other than getting used to a new climate, I think we’ll manage to feel right at home.