My interview was with an alum who is actually working in the field I’d like to be in after graduation (automotive marketing). I expected it to be pretty informal (she pretty much told me to dress casually – not business-casual, just…casual, so I showed up wearing nice jeans and a sweatshirt), but it seemed like she’s had quite a bit of experience with these and had a list of prepared questions (and a manila envelope with them) which were mostly HR-type stuff: resume walk-through, strengths, weaknesses, tough situations at work, leadership experience, extracurricular activities, why Ross, why marketing. She threw me for a loop when she asked me if I had considered any other program at Ross other than the Full-time and why not. The strength question was in a form of “if you had to describe yourself to your future classmates, what three words would you use?” We talked for about half an hour, after which she said that the official part was concluded and opened it up for a Q&A. She told me quite a bit about the school and even though the “on the record” part was done, I didn’t really let my guard down and exhibited a pretty decent knowledge of the school even when asking questions.
All in all, it was pretty dry, but certainly friendly and she warmed up after we discovered a common ground. I thought it went pretty well considering my more than mild distaste for HR-type interviews.
Result – denied. Not even waitlisted. Considering the fact that my stats were very decent (720 GMAT/3.4 GPA/5+ years work experience, etc), I was quite upset. My thought process now is that the interview probably did me no favors.
