A Wharton interview report with questions was submitted to Clear Admit by a Round 1 applicant on-campus.
I arrived at my interview about 15 minutes early. The lobby was filled with interviewees. People recommended arriving early to bond with your TBD group, but for me, it was impossible to know who my TBD teammates were. I guess if you are interviewing at a hub city the situation might be a bit different. I also don’t think it matters too much as people were all very nice to each other.
Team Based Discussion (TBD)
Our TBD went very quickly and smoothly. The two second year students repeated the prompt and gave us an overview, then just sat and took notes for the rest of the session. We started with a brief overview of everyone’s idea, and went on to the TBD. It helped that we all had similar ideas, so it wasn’t hard to merge our ideas together. One person acted as a note-taker, one person as time-keeper, but all teammates contributed somewhat equally.
Advice for TBD
My recommendation for the TBD is that, since each person really only get ~5 mins of air time, prepare ahead of time on how you want to utilize that time to demonstrate your value add to a team. In addition, practice your short overview of your idea to get comfortable with what a 30 secs to 1 min pitch is like.
After the TBD, people were called in our seating order to do our 1-on-1s. I was very nervous afterwards about mine because I didn’t get any questions on “how do you think the TBD went” or “was that your typical role”. We mostly talked about why Wharton, why MBA, and life at Wharton. Since I did get admitted, I’d say don’t stress on the questions you get asked (or not get asked). Reflecting back, perhaps I wasn’t asked about the TBD because it went very well. I have heard my friend getting asked “what happened during…” for the part that didn’t go so well during her TBD.
Wharton also scheduled a lot of events on interview day to help you get to know the school better. I’d definitely take advantage of these if possible.
Good luck!
Preparing for your UPenn Wharton MBA Admissions Interview? Check out Clear Admit’s other resources:
- Clear Admit The Wharton School Interview Guide: Strategic tips for approaching Wharton’s interview questions, and more.
- Interview Archive: More firsthand accounts from Wharton MBA applicants themselves
- Understanding the MBA Admissions Interview: Team-based discussion
- Podcast Episode 23: 5 Most Common MBA Interview Questions You Need to Ace
