Kellogg turned Evanston into a 42‑challenge welcome.

ACE is unique to Kellogg. It gives incoming international students the skills and confidence to succeed in an American MBA classroom, and a head start on everyday American life.

Part of that is simply knowing where you live. Evanston was about to be home, and a campus map in a welcome packet doesn't make a town feel familiar. The program wanted something students would actually do together: get out of the building, talk to each other, and come back knowing their way around.

And it had to work for a big group of students from around the world, many of them just getting to know each other.

We started with the Evanston favorites every visitor should find: murals, historic buildings and statues around town. Then Kellogg added its own picks, the spots that make Northwestern feel like Northwestern, like the Weber Arch, Deering Library and "The Rock."

The Rock is a good example of why local knowledge matters. It has sat between University Hall and Harris Hall since the 1940s, and student groups repaint it for holidays and events, so it works as a campus billboard. No guidebook tells you that. A challenge can.

Illustrative challenges written for this page, based on real stops from the event.

Forty-two challenges in under three hours is deliberately too many. Teams can't do everything, so they have to decide what to go after: which corner of town, which landmarks, which points are worth the walk. For a program about working together across cultures, those street-corner debates are the real exercise.

It also keeps the finish exciting. The winning team completed 30 of the 42, so the race stayed open all afternoon.