The following UPenn / Wharton interview questions and report were submitted to Clear Admit by a Round 1 applicant. Good luck to them!
I interviewed in the morning and got to the room about 30 minutes early, along with several other applicants. I believe most people had gotten a chance to introduce themselves to nearly everyone else beforehand, which made it easier when we got in the room (I had already talked to 4/5 of the others).
My group did very well as a whole, we went with one person’s idea and developed it further while taking pieces of other’s ideas that fit well. One guy was very eager to be the one writing on the board, and one pounced on declaring herself the timekeeper (although in practice we all made sure to keep us on track). We started out the meeting setting time limits for different parts of the discussion which we did not really stick to much. We ended up finishing with about 2 seconds left at the timer and our idea became something that was actually coherent. Some things that worked for us that I would suggest:
• Putting a hard stop at 7-8 min left to plan out who will present what in the last 5 minutes
• Using the whiteboard
• Taking notes
• Calling people by their names
• Focus not just on the specific idea in your pitch, but also on broader themes and things that could be applicable across a variety of ideas
• Disagreeing is not bad if you do it constructively, you don’t all need to think everything everyone else says is the best idea ever conceived
The 10 min interview after was extremely laid back, he asked what I thought of the TBD, if I thought it was representative of Wharton team-based activities, and asked me a couple quick questions from reading my resume that got at why I wanted to go to Wharton, and left me a couple min for questions for him.
All in all, I suppose I can see how one can screw it up by dominating the meeting or trying to hard to “be a leader”, or if one doesn’t participate at all. I don’t see how one can really do well in this scenario though, and I imagine they take out the 15-20% of interviewees who screw it up and re-evaluate the application of those remaining to get to the final offers.
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