The following is a guest post from Naija MBA Gal summarizing her Chicago Booth MBA admissions interview that was originally published on her blog. Naija MBA Gal is a consultant specializing in risk assurance at one of the big consulting firms, and she is aiming to get into a top 10 business school this year. You can follow Naija MBA Gal’s application journey on her blog.
I had an amazing interview with Booth!!! And I am super busy at work trying to make up for the three hours I took off work yesterday. But it is totally worth it.
The interview was supposed to start by 2pm, my interviewer and I had agreed to meet at a restaurant half way between our offices. About, one hour to the time, we had to reschedule for a slightly later time but that wasn’t an issue.
I spent the hour before the interview going over my answers to the questions I had picked for practice. I’m ashamed to say this but I really hadn’t done so much preparation beyond just having a list of questions. I got to the venue about 10 minutes before the scheduled time and waited for my interviewer who was a few minutes late. He was profusely sorry for that (very different from my interviewer last year).
He was quick to tell me that it was more of a chat than an interview and that he wasn’t expected to endorse or criticize my candidacy but to give a qualitative feedback on our conversation. The interview started with him sharing his background which relaxed me considerably. I noticed that the similarities in our background even before he pointed them out. We quickly moved into the interview proper with a version of the “why Booth” question. He wasn’t convinced with my answer (I noticed we kept getting back to the question in the discussion till I had given every thing I knew about Booth in my answer) but he seemed happy with that eventually.
“Why entrepreneurship” is another question that took a long time for us to tackle mostly because he thought entrepreneurship was hard and that it required a lot of passion which admittedly I had but I had to go to the root of that interest, the starting point before he was satisfied with my answer. All the other questions were a breeze. At several points during the interview I felt a bit panicked, almost like I scared to miss the answer or like I just gave a wrong answer but they weren’t so many.
The interview really was more of a chat. I didn’t use my prepared answers, I used the essence of the answer the questions but they didn’t come out in the same manner. I felt more connection to the interviewer than the first time. I walked out of the interview happy (the doubts came later), which I hope is a good sign.
