Originally posted by AGirlsMBA
I did this interview on-campus (HBS actually sets a time and place for you to be, no choosing). The interview was early in the morning, so I showed up to the Admissions office and they directed me to another building where my interview would be held (by a part-time faculty who is on the Admissions Committee). I found my way to the lounge and waited and then my interviewer came and got me. (I think most ppl know this, but in case they don’t, Harvard is one of the few places where the interview is not blind – the interviewer has thoroughly read your application). We went into a conference room and there were no pleasantries “Hi, how are you, blah blah blah”, it was immediately “So, you made a pretty big career change, talk about it”. I was a little dumbstruck for 1-2 seconds but I think I got out a good answer. Other questions:
- You’ve only been working in a corporate setting for a couple of years, how are you going to feel sitting in a finance or accounting
class with peers who have spend 5 or 7 years immersed in those fields? Are you going to be intimidated?
- How does your company do _________?
- Tell me about your company, and your company’s consumer
- What do you think XYZ recent happening in the news?
- A LOT of company/functional area specific questions involving finance, operations, product, etc. – I think he was trying to see what knowledge I had and would be able to contribute to my section while discussing cases
- Why Harvard
- A time when I turned a bad team situation into a good one
- And for the last questions he asked what I would have wanted him to ask that he hadn’t. I said I’d like to outline my strengths as I see him and we discussed those.
There was no time to ask him any questions about Harvard. Overall the interview was about 30 minutes and I left with a decent feeling, but who knows? After that I had lunch with students, which was helpful and attended a class with a friend of a friend. The class was Strategy and was interesting, but I did feel like the time allotted was not enough to adequately cover all the aspects of the case. Then again, who am I to say? Overall, of course the facilities are impressive and it’s interesting that there is a full campus instead of just a single building like at some other places.
