# Kellogg

> Ali Asif at the Kellogg School of Management: Full-Time MBA, Class of 2027, majors in Finance and Strategy, the Asset Management Practicum, and a year split between Chicago and Al Khobar.

## Why Kellogg

People ask why I'd start an MBA while running a company. Fair question. I was already general manager of Northlane Solutions in Al Khobar and I own Procul Solutions. What I didn't have was a seat in the United States.

Most of what I know about operating I learned in Saudi Arabia, bidding airfield lighting and helipad packages and building a company around AI agents. I came to test those instincts against people who have built at a different scale, in other markets, with other money behind them. A room of founders, investors and operators does that faster than another decade of my own mistakes would.

There's a second reason. The US side of my work lives here. I'm building a link between US venture and Saudi capital, and you can't build that from one end of it.

## The program

I'm in the Full-Time MBA, Class of 2027, on the Evanston campus. Year one is mostly the core. Year two is where I choose, and I chose Finance and Strategy.

The Finance major, which sits alongside Strategy, comes together through corporate finance, entrepreneurial finance and venture capital, the Asset Management Practicum, and Derivatives in the winter. I'm taking Derivatives for a grade because pass/fail courses don't count toward a major. My best results have come in applied courses, so I lean that way when I bid for electives.

## The Asset Management Practicum

The practicum is FINC-457, taught by Phillip Braun, on Wednesday evenings. It's a class that runs a real student-managed fund. I cover five large-cap names for it: AMAT, CMI, META, NOW and NVDA. Every week I write an equity position review on each one, with a call and the reasoning behind it, plus the rows that go into the fund's live portfolio sheet. It's due Tuesday, before Wednesday's class.

I missed the first weekly submission. So I built an engine. Each Tuesday after the market closes, it pulls the week's data, drafts the five reviews with a five-year chart and a snapshot for each name, and builds the spreadsheet rows. It sends both files to my phone. The engine never touches the fund's live sheet. I paste the rows in myself.

It has failed too. The first live run happened with no network and shipped nothing, so it now waits for a connection and tries again before it gives up. That's how I work with most of my systems: build it, let it break once, then add the gate.

## Clubs and community

I'm a member of the Kellogg AI Club, the Consulting Club and the Venture Capital Lab. Member is the whole title, and I'd rather say so plainly.

## Chicago and Al Khobar

I split the year between the two. For most of the autumn Chicago is eight hours behind Al Khobar, and nine once the clocks change. So the company has to run while I'm in class or asleep. It runs on agents, with a person approving every price and every document before it goes out. I'm the one reading the log in the morning.

Chicago also has what I came for on the bridge side: the private equity and venture community, and Kellogg mentors who are partners at venture and private equity firms and have stayed accessible. The people on the near end of the corridor are here.

## What Kellogg changed

I expected frameworks, and I got them. The quantitative cores were harder for me than the applied courses, and I'd rather admit that than pretend otherwise. What changed more was how I read my own work. Writing a call on a public stock every week, where the fund's portfolio manager and my classmates can disagree with it, makes me say what I think and why in a small space.

The other change is geography. I used to treat Saudi Arabia as the whole map. From Evanston I can see how much of what I do there would make sense to an investor in Chicago, and how little of it they've been told. That gap is the thing I'm working on.

Canonical: https://heyaliasif.com/kellogg