Michigan

The spring season continued our momentum with a sold-out Pistons basketball game sponsored by Covisent. Thanks to Shankar Kiru '97 for setting up the game with access for dinner and drinks in the Covisent Club at the Palace of Auburn Hills and great half-court seats. Ed Pound '93 even ended up on the cover of the Detroit Free Press sports page, which he called his 15 minutes of fame. We have also had some large turnouts for our networking socials with other business school clubs throughout the spring.

We have formalized many things this year with a strong executive team of myself, Jeff Wagner '97, Ed Pound and Jennifer Crowley '01. Since the implementation of dues, we are operating in the black, have opened a bank account and are subsidizing our events for dues-paying members. We have formed an association, initiated by our club, of seven Top Out of Michigan Schools (ATOMS), which is beginning to foster bigger and better social networking events.

We are regularly attracting more than 50 top professionals at our monthly socials, and will kick off a rotating schedule in the fall, hosted by a different ATOMS club each month. Kellogg will host the first of these events, which will be an Oktoberfest. Then, a different school will pick up on the second Thursday of each month. Our coalition includes HBS, University of Chicago GSB, Columbia, Wharton, Sloan and the Kelly School at Indiana. We have also used this network to include more educational/business events on our calendar, such as panel discussions with bankruptcy attorneys, a night with the Piston's CEO, a seminar on financial planning and more.

We will host two major speaker events this year — Alix Partners and Hayes Lemmertz for a discussion on Hayes' restructuring, and a night with the CEO of Borders (a Kellogg grad). Kellogg is partnering with the prominent local professional organizations, the Turnaround Managers Association and the Association for Corporate Growth, to make these events even more successful.

The summer party was held for the second year at Mike Petix's '99 house, and our second annual golf outing will be held at Tanglewood on Aug. 8. We are planning on topping last year's holiday event and continuing to provide you with more exciting opportunities to network with top-caliber people in Michigan, as well as to promote the Kellogg brand.

Keep checking our site for new information or contact any of the club's officers. Make sure we have your email address if you are not getting regular announcements. We cannot continue to pull these events off without your support in the form of both attendance and participation and your nominal dues. Please join us at one of the upcoming events to see what we are all about, or give us a ring if you can get involved in making the club a continued success.