The following Columbia MBA interview report was submitted to Clear Admit by a J-Term applicant. Good luck to them!
I read through all the interview reports here and thought I’d add my experience to this list.
I was invited to interview and matched with one alumni (who turned down the request). It wasn’t until I contacted the 3rd alumni that I was finally able to schedule an interview. In total it took 12 days from the interview invite to my interview date. Quite a challenging wait because I was anxious to get it over with as you can imagine.
The interviewer started off the interview by asking me:
a) Which other MBA programs I had applied to? (None other than Columbia)
b) Why was I not applying to Stanford?
So in order to answer the second question, I backtracked and covered the standard questions – Walk through of my résumé, Why MBA, Why Now, Why Columbia, and finally why not Stanford. The interview then took a turn away from the question list and we got into a conversation about start-ups (because my interviewer works in one and I am looking to start-up in NYC). Somewhere along the line he remembered that he needed to take some notes and so he scanned through a list that he had on his computer and said that the only question we hadn’t discussed was “What is your 5 year post-MBA goal?”
The whole interview was a conversation and so there was a back and forth with me asking him contextual questions throughout the conversation. All in all – quite a relaxed experience. My interviewer also told me that he does tons of interviews and would recommend that I be admitted to Columbia. Of course – I’m very excited about this but the game’s not over till its over. Waiting to hear from Columbia!
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