Friday, March 5, 2010

DAK Recap Series #2 - The Admits

The Admits

Another purpose of admits weekend is to meet the other admits and basically see if you connect with your future classmates. However, I don't think DAK was designed well for that. It might be different for those who were able to attend some of the Thursday night social events, but for the majority of people who attended only Friday and Saturday full day events, the schedule was extremely packed with talks after talks. We had a little scavenger hunt activity on Saturday but it was cut short due to my section's never ending Q&A with the section leaders (which was not at all bad~). From my conversation with several admits who also went to other schools' admits weekend, it seemed that certain schools have more free time for socializing or just admits bonding activities. I am not sure if everyone wants more time to bond with other admits (some of whom will not be your classmates anyway...), but I certainly can appreciate some more time to do that. Our scavenger hunt was surely fun! Here is a picture of how we spelled out Kellogg in the atrium :)


Our Scavenger hunt team

The bustling hallway

Admits listening to presentations

One thing I want to emphasize is that you do have plenty of time outside of the regular day-time activities to interact with people. We had a dinner, a closing reception, as well as pub time and club time. Unfortunately my energy level deteriorated with the lack of sleep and the fully packed day time activity. I was barely functioning during pub time on Friday and didn't even make it to the club on Saturday. So ya, can't comment too much on that I suppose :)

TG = "Thank God it's Friday"
@ the Keg
a dive bar which apparently is Kellogg students' hang out hot spot

So overall, I think I was able to talk to some 20-30 admits and really built a connection with about 6-8 of them? Which was not too bad. After-all, I am more into building meaningful connections than meeting as many people as possible. My overall impression of the admits is in line with the students, maybe a little shy and more low-key, but then again, I didn't make it to the club.

P.S It seems that half of the admits were set on Kellogg and half were still comparing schools. The most admits I encountered were deciding between Kellogg and Wharton or Kellogg and Berkeley. Also there were quite a few international folks who made all the way from Europe, Latin America and Asia to Evanston for the weekend. Kudos to them!

Next post: DAK - the MBA program

3 comments:

  1. Wow sounds like a fun weekend! There were quite a few folks last year who were having a tough time deciding between Booth and Kellogg!

    Well, all the best with your decision and with the Harvard/Haas result!

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  2. Great pictures! Seems like going to DAK was a worthwhile experience. I'm looking forward to going myself :-). And thanks for the kind words, it would be awesome to be classmates (though I'm hoping for a higher destination for you!)

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  3. Enjoy reading the posts. I'm a current student on DAK Exec and we're going to include more "bonding" time during DAK II, so thanks for the feedback!

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