I live in LA and given my hectic work schedule, I could not really afford to go to Berkeley, so I arrange for a local interview. I contacted my interviewer and we agreed to meet over lunch at a restaurant in Hollywood near his office. The interviewer was a recent alum (Class of 2011).
The interviewer was very friendly and welcoming. I brought copies of my resume but he already had a copy with him. The interview was very casual and he was probably younger than I was. Overall, it was very conversational and we kept on being interrupted by the waitress so there was not a lot of opportunity to get to serious. Standard questions:
- Tell me about yourself
- Why MBA?
- Why Haas?
- What do you want to do after your MBA?
- How will you contribute to the program?
Those questions were covered before we even got our food. I prepared a lot of this interview. I contacted more than 5 students and 5 alumns of the school and spent significant amount of time researching the clubs and programs at Haas. Getting this questions out of the way, allowed me to ask him a lot of questions for about the next 30-40 minutes. I asked him about many clubs and classes, but unfortunately, he didn’t really know a lot of them. Also, I was mentioning a lot of names and people that I had talk to but he also didn’t know them. I felt like I knew a little bit more about the school than he did. I tried my best to connect all four principles in my answers and they way that I spoke without actually saying them.
He seemed very friendly and seemed more as an agent for questions that I had rather than as an interviewer / obstacle in between me and getting accepted. I closed the interview by re-stating my interest in the school as my first choice and gave him my business card and invited him to stay in touch or do lunch again outside of this context.
We are supposed to hear back in about a week. So fingers crossed.
