London Business School sends you the contact details for an alumnus that they have allocated to you and then you arrange a time and place to meet. In my case, they did a good job of matching me to someone who works in an area that I am interested in and I went to his office for the interview.
The interview was probably the most enjoyable part of my LBS application process. In previous admissions- related correspondence and events, LBS had come across to me as quite arrogant and as though I was one of thousands going through their MBA machine. The interview was much better than that, though I guess that was likely because of the alumnus I had.
We started out by going through my CV and what I had written that I wanted to do in the future. He asked me some tough questions about what I could offer people in that industry and really tested me on some of the things that I had written. As I understand it, all LBS interviews have to have a presentation – they obviously give the alumni a set of topics that they can use if they don’t want to come up with their own.
My topic was a fairly generic question on methods to improve an organisation based on a fact scenario detailed in a passage of text, so didn’t require any pre-existing knowledge. I think he wanted me to talk for three minutes (from what I’ve heard they range up to 5 mins) and he gave me something like five minutes to prepare.
He asked some pretty probing questions around whether an MBA was really going to help me do what I wanted to do and drilled down pretty hard into why I was doing it. He seemed to be doing it out of genuine concern for me, rather than for the school, which was good.
I was given an offer, but I managed to get a place at Cambridge Judge Business School, so will be going there.
