The following INSEAD interview report was submitted to Clear Admit by a Round 3 applicant. Good luck to them!
This website really helped me a lot when I was preparing for the interview. So, I’m returning the favor 🙂
I was invited to two separate interviews with two INSEAD alumni off-campus. Both interviewers were friendly and the interviews were more like a relaxed conversation. One thing I would say is that I felt like INSEAD carefully chose the interviewers who have something in common with you. The interviewers are I think at least 10 years older than me. They are very admirable in their expertise and I was very impressed with both of them.
First interviewer – duration 1:30 hr
- Asked me to introduce myself
- Why MBA? Why INSEAD?
- Ask in detail about my family business and my career aspiration (short/long term goals) – we spent a lot of time on this
- Ask my opinion about an event that recently happened
- What are other schools that I applied? How will I prioritize if I get into more than one?
- Ask about culture shock experience
- Ask about one of my extra activities
- Do you have any question? – Here I asked the interviewer about what they like/don’t like about the school/The impact an MBA had on her career path/Any recommendations if I don’t get accepted.
Overall, I felt ok about the interview because the interviewer seemed to respond positively. However, I was definitely more nervous than usual during this interview, probably because of the interviewer’s profile. One constructive feedback I got was that I need to sharpen my goals a little bit more – super useful because I prepare that more for the next interview.
Second interviewer – Duration: 1 hr
- Introduce yourself
- Ask about my career change
- Ask about my job responsibility
- Ask about how I could contribute to the team learning experience
- Ask about my strength and weakness
- Ask about my career aspiration (short/mid/long term goals)
- Ask if I have experience with culture shock and how I deal with it
- Ask about my quant skill – it’s definitely not my strength but the interviewer looked at all my quant score and surprisingly gave a positive comment on my growth instead of focusing on the highest score I had (which wasn’t very high)
- Why MBA? Why INSEAD? What are other schools and ask me to rank them
- Ask about extra-activities in high-school and college
- Do you have any questions? I asked pretty much the same thing that I asked the first interviewer
During this interview, I felt very relaxed and it was like a real conversation in which I could clearly convey my message. The interviewer also gave a lot of useful advice and info about school and he pretty much said at the end that he’s ok with me and there’s no concern regarding the interview evaluation. It will be up to the school to see the overall proportion of the entire class. So, I felt very good about this interview.
Results: Pending (Fingers crossed)
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