6/7/2006- Did my interview last week with an alumnus and received the offer of admission this week for the Evening MBA program. I have a fairly unique background which seems to be a plus based on the majority of forums and blogs, but the alum was still relatively closely matched up. A little extra on me- I did strictly self-study for the GMAT and scored a 710 (I mention the self-study for anyone wondering about taking a class), my undergrade GPA was 3.41, I’m 31, and have right at 5 years of relevant work experience. I just want to add that for the context that I fall really close to the means for all of these categories so that can be considered when weighing what I write. I have no idea what role any of these played.
For my interview there were no zingers and I’m really posting this as an aid to other interviewees who have a certain interviewing style like I do. I don’t particularly like formatted questions like “Describe a time when you were successful in –fill in the blank–“, etcetera, because I don’t think they really do justice to the actual experience you’re describing. I could tell my interviewer was not interested in asking all the standard questions just for asking’s sake, so I basically talked his ear off about what I thought was relevant, using a sort of diverging chronology expanding on significant things that shed more light on how I got from A to B to C. I knew he would need to know Why an MBA?, Why now?, Why here? so I expanded on all of that in detail, without waiting for him to prompt me, so that I could present it in a way that was more conducive to my personality rather than from a cold start, responding to a formatted question being posed to me. My interviewer had no problem letting me steer the interview and I basically took it from start to finish with little prompting on his end, including segueing into my additional questions myself. Like I say, this is the particular style in which I feel comfortable conducting interviews, so for those who are similar in interviewing style or are looking for suggestions, my interviewer seemed to appreciate my approach and also seemed to interpret it as excitement for the school itself. That I was fairly successful in pushing this interview style meant that time had really gotten on before any offbeat questions could be asked. However, I have no idea if he had any prepared or not- there were just none asked. The only even slightly divergent question I had was related to a job I had which I described to him as what I consider the launchpad for my career. He used that to ask what particularly about it was important in launching my career.
I started to feel like I was overpreparing and playing away from my strength in on-the-fly chit-chatting. I didn’t want to sound scripted, but I knew if I was asked a particular question on an experience that I hadn’t considered before, I would not answer it well. So I used a list of generic questions for interviews I found in one of these forums and prepared only the ones that I thought I couldn’t wing on my own. I pulled in other odd questions from a bunch of forums, and figured I had a good base, and if I was asked something I hadn’t prepared, then so be it- I can’t imagine one muffed answer will kick you out of contention. I wrote down the answers to the tougher questions and at least got the idea in my head, then went through hypothetical conversations in my head without looking at what I’d written so that I’d have a better chance of remembering once I was in a room with a person staring at me, waiting for an answer. At about this time, I started to feel I was overpreparing and decided to let the rest come naturally.At my job, I happened to be up for a performance review anyways, so I scheduled it for the same day in order to get my tongue loosened up which turned out to be a good idea.I stayed away from coffee all day and ate some sugary things toward the end of the working day (the interview was scheduled for 6:00 PM, about the time I normally crash mentally) so I’d hopefully catch my second wind at about the right time, which happened more or less. My interviewer offered a little bit of feedback without my asking, saying that if my application was as successful in portraying what I had just conveyed, then I had done very well. In hindsight, it seems to have been a good sign.
As everyone else mentions, know yourself, your past, and your goals- short, medium, and long. Leadership attributes are something they’re big on. I don’t have a huge amount of leadership experience but made sure to mention what I had. Plan for the worst and hope for the best, and just as other people have said, a slip up here will not be likely to do you in, so in that facet, it’s not like other interviews you’ve had. I think that was probably my biggest hang-up- treating this interview differently than a job interview where your potential job is very much on the line based on your performance during the interview. I tried several times to reconvince myself that this was not a do or die situation and all the same found myself nervous leading up to the interview. Plan for those eventualities and you’ll be less likely to be thrown off by them and keep the whole experience in perspective as much as possible.
