I had my "non-evaluative" chat with admissions today, I think it went well. He assured me that he doesn't read applications and so the call has no bearing (I assume if you make a fool of yourself it might). We chatted a bit about my goals and what I liked about Kellogg. He actually had some knowledge about my area of interest so we branched off on that for a bit, before I asked him some questions. No real discussion about my resume or anything like that, but I guess these can go in really any direction. He did ask me at the end which schools I applied to, which is a really awkward question to answer, I really do have Kellogg as one of my top 2 choices, but I worry about the impression my school choices give. Ultimately I wonder if thats part of the goal of the call from admissions, to gauge where interest is.
I wish I felt comfortable enough asking how/why they select certain people for these calls. For what its worth I'm US based but did not visit campus. My actual interview with an alumn is this weekend, so I guess this was a good primer