I am an applicant from India and I had my interview with an alumni yesterday (29th Nov 2006). I am a first time applicant to the GSB. A snapshot of my profile would be:
- working in Information Technology since July 2003 (3 yrs and counting)
- undergrad GPA – 3.7
- GMAT – 750 (Q50, V41)
The interview started with my interviewer explaining about his work, recent schedule (he’s been traveling around a bit) and how things got out of his hands (because of which my interview got postponed twice) and stuff like that. And then we went on to discuss about my work at my company and about my college. This clearly was the ice-breaker session. I ordered a coffee and he ordered apple juice and we then moved on to the CORE.
It began with the standard question – “Why MBA?” A long explanation later, this was out of the way. The interviewer did not stop me in the middle of this explanation, but made notes at several instances. Quite unexpectedly, the next question was “What are the schools you are applying to?”. I told my list and also explained my preferences. Next came out “What are your post MBA plans?” and my mouth started working in hyper space once again. I had a lot to say here. The interviewer waited till i finished and then shot the next question, “Why Finance?”, as my career plans were centered around this discipline. Some more justification to be done and work for the mouth once more. He was taking notes at numerous instances while i was answering all these questions.
We were a good 30 minutes into the interview by now and i felt we had covered all the “justification” questions. As expected, next came out “Why Chicago?”. I had lots and lots to say here and i told myself i was in the home stretch. Sipped the coffee and began talking again. The interviewer gave me the nod of acceptance (or so i think) on almost all the points i made here. After nearly 10 minutes of non stop speaking, i was done. Immediately came, “What if you have to choose between Chicago and some other school?” I had prepared for this and hence this was a simple question to answer. “So, how are you planning to fund your MBA?”, was the next question. I did not expect this question, but since the answer was straight forward, i did not have any issues explaining it to him. I even managed to explain him the amount of research and investigation i had done on this.
Next came out a set of “behavioral” questions. “As a team leader, what is the biggest challenge you face?”, “In managing a team, what do you consider to be your weakness?”, “How have your life and your profession prepared you for an MBA?”, “What do you consider to be your biggest mistake ever?” I think that’s all of this type of questions. I think i did okay in answering these questions.
We then realized that we had been speaking for the past 90 minutes 🙂 He then set the stage open for me to ask questions to him. I had a small list of questions and i asked them to him. Once he answered them, the interview was over. Since the interview is not a make or break part of the process, there is no change to the application after the interview. The sum of all parts will be known on Dec 20.
