Meredith Johnson ’26 –MJ, for short– heard Jessie B. Evans ‘26 before she met him.
It was orientation day, after a full program welcome she would later describe as being “hosed down with information.” Outside, the cohort had spilled into a mixer of wine and small plates, the early choreography of a group of people still learning each other’s names. Then a voice. Deep, unmistakable, “on a different frequency,” as MJ puts it. A laugh after it. Then a joke.
“I’m like, who, who is this man?” she remembers. “I was, like, attracted to his aura.”
She decided to sit down next to him. She had a feeling they would be friends. She was right.
Jessie remembers the moment in fragments. The line itself is gone, but the impression has stayed. “She said something crazy and I was cracking up,” he says. “Like, oh my God, I can’t believe you said that to me. I love you.” Neither can quite recall what MJ said. Both agree it was probably inappropriate. Both agree it worked.
After a decade in Los Angeles building a multi-hyphenate career — actor, writer, director, producer, founder of a 501(c)(3) organization, Hollywood Here, that has partnered with Disney, Sony, and Marvel and a Master’s in Film Producing already under his belt — Jessie understood what a first day of school felt like. “Maybe because this is, like, my 100th first day, I understand that everybody’s feeling the exact same way. Everyone’s, like, kind of nervous, scared to talk to people. So I was like, this is the opportune time for me to jump in.”
MJ, watching the room from a different angle, had come to Northwestern from the Washington, D.C. area with a leadership degree, a marketing resume, and a creative restlessness she hadn’t yet found a home for. When she heard Jessie’s laugh, she made her move.
MJ: The Swiss Army Knife
“My name is MJ,” she says. “I’m a jack of all trades, interested in marketing, a lover of film and art and sports. I came to MSLCE because I can’t just choose one thing. I must have them all.” The line is delivered with the easy polish of someone who has had to explain herself before. MJ majored in leadership as an undergraduate and gravitated toward marketing because, as she puts it, “I thought it was kind of the only way to be creative in business.” She landed in a non-creative industry and found herself “not feeling very fulfilled and inspired.” MSLCE offered the broadest aperture she could find. She arrived imagining a future in live entertainment, music festivals, concerts, perhaps a venue of her own, and carrying what she calls “a sneaky little side passion” for sports.
That side passion is now a Chicago Sky internship. She had assumed a creative wanting to work in sports was “a little counterintuitive.” The opposite turned out to be true. “It is a creative industry. It is entertainment, and it’s a huge industry.” What draws her in is the same thing that draws anyone to the arts. “I, as a former athlete, love seeing how athletes express themselves through movement and sport, and that’s how they make connections. So I think it is, like, really beautiful and kind of artistic in a different way.”
The biggest internal shift came in a fall group project for Allison Henry‘s Design, Culture and Politics class. MJ had assumed every leadership degree student would want to lead, and decided to test what would happen if she stepped back. She volunteered to take notes. “Work wasn’t really getting to where I wanted it to be,” she says. “I needed to go back into my former role.” It was a small humility. The lesson it taught her was the opposite. “I have a really high standard for the work that I put out. I need to be the leader in the group project.”
Her favorite memory of the year is not in Evanston at all but in Florence, where the program’s Renaissance Leadership intensive put her in front of the Medici legacy and the architecture it commissioned. “The Renaissance happened in Florence because of the Medici family,” she says, with the conviction of someone who has stood in the Duomo and felt the argument hold.
Jessie: The Mogul in Training
Jessie introduces himself, almost apologetically, a departure from his usual countenance, as an actor, writer, director, and producer. “I hate to say it like that because I feel like people don’t take you seriously when you say that,” he admits, “but I’ve done it all and I’ve done them all at a professional level.”
He chose MSLCE over an MBA because the MBA didn’t speak his language. “I felt like I had the creative locked down, but something was missing. And that something missing was the business acumen.” When he leads, he asks for one thing: excellence, defined individually. “Are you working at the highest level of your intelligence, at the highest level of your creativity?”
The Gallup strengths test, taken on the program’s first day, named his top trait Command. It confirmed something he already knew, and pointed to something he wanted to change. “In my positions in the past, people have been, you know, scared to voice their opinion because I’m very direct. I’m not a fan of self-deprecation or fake humbleness. And I think a lot of people mistake that for arrogance. But I know better than anyone that if I know anything, I know nothing.”
Classes like The Power of Pitching and Persuasion, taught by Laverne McKinnon, and Mandi Glowen‘s Professional Development course did the quieter work of widening his stance. “I now realize that everybody doesn’t do things like me, and that it doesn’t mean that the result is going to be less optimal. It’ll just be a different path.”
Then there was AI for Marketers, the Kellogg course he almost didn’t take. “I remember looking at the rubric and thinking, I cannot do this. I called my mom. I was like, I’m actually kind of scared to take this class.” He took it anyway. He earned an A. “I really, really had to try hard in that class. So I really deserved that grade.” For someone who, by his own admission, “hates doing things that I’m not good at,” the grade was less the point than the proof.
The friendships Jessie made on day one are the scaffolding of his year. With Sophia Agusta ‘26, whose self-introduction as a playwright on the first morning prompted him to slide her a script before lunch, he is producing Industries in Focus, an MSLCE sponsored social media project spotlighting the breadth of disciplines inside MSLCE. With Caitlyn Parrott ‘26, an admired classmate whose conversational range runs from quantum physics to AI, he is building something he believes “could change the industry.”
Asked what he wants next, he doesn’t pause. “My goal in life is to make cool stuff with my friends. I want to be a media mogul. I want to help shape AI in the creative industries.”
After the Mixer
MJ and Jessie’s first collaboration arrived in their first quarter — a custom GPT called Node AI, designed to log networking notes, track relationships, and prompt timely follow-ups. They imagined building it into a real company. Then MJ stepped back.
“I was, like, Jessie, I don’t want to hold you back,” she says. “He has so much energy, so much passion and internal motivation. I’m very impressed by him. I think we’re a little too similar, and we, like, fill the same role in a company. So I was like, you go ahead. You do this. It’s called Node AI, and it’s really sick.” She offers it as a plug, and laughs.
Jessie frames her exit as a strength. “I love that she had the foresight to be like, okay, this is not what I want to be doing. We did work together, and I’m sure we’ll work together again in the future.”
This is what the year has actually taught both of them — not that the cohort is a launchpad for every idea, but that knowing when to share a project and when to share a coffee is its own form of professional intelligence. Jessie is still chasing the mogul plan. Next up, the Content department at Netflix where he’ll be in the Creative Talent Engagement and Development team. MJ is on the phone for the Chicago Sky, fielding objections about Angel Reese’s departure with a question of her own about UCLA’s Gabriela Jaquez. Each is using the program, in different ways, for the same thing: to scale something they already know how to do, in the company of people who push them.
The voice that carried across the orientation lawn is still carrying. The joke MJ made still hasn’t been recovered. It doesn’t really matter. She sat down. He laughed. MSLCE took it from there.
Credits:
Photographer: Dmytro Cherkaskyi
Creative Director & Executive Producer: Jessie B. Evans
Senior Producer: Sophia Agusta
Talent Wrangler: Ayrah Husain
Interviews Conducted by: Caitlyn Parrott
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