This report summarizes my Columbia interview in late November 2005. After receiving my interview invitation from CBS Admissions Committee, I contacted one of the interviewers from the list of interviewers that the school had provided me. To my surprise, after we agreed on a time to meet, my interviewer posed a couple of typical MBA interview questions over the phone: what is your background, why do you want/need an MBA and why now, why Columbia, and what do you want to do after graduation. Although I was later told that this is unusual, applicants reading this report may want to be prepared for such “preliminary” questioning.
On the morning of the interview, I was not able to contact my interviewer to confirm our meeting. I received a email later in the day asking if we could reschedule the meeting.
I met the interviewer in his office after working hours. He had printed out a copy of my resume, which I had sent to him prior to the meeting. The interview was not particulary informal, yet not as formal as one may expect for a non-alum interview. He started off by telling me that my resume was confusing because of the manner in which I had chronologically arranged some of my information. He spent a couple of minutes telling me how to make it better, move things around, etc. I humbly accepted his advice and said that I agreed. He then said that he had not had much time to look over my resume before the interview and commented that this could have contributed to his finding it a bit confusing.
We then moved into the guts of the interview and I fielded the typical questions one would expect in an MBA interview. He asked me to walk him through my educational and professional experience.
I was then asked to explain my job responsibilities, who I manage, report to, etc. We then talked about my industry and the interviewer asked me to talk about my company, how it fits into its industry, its scope of operations, etc.
At this point, we were about thirty minutes into the interview. The interviewer then began to focus his questioning on my reasons for wanting an MBA and WHY COLUMBIA. Anyone interviewing with Columbia should be prepared to convince the interviewer that they want to go to Columbia more than anything else. Be ready to talk about the program in great detail: classes you want to take, clubs you want to join, students and faculty whom with you spoke, etc.
The remainder of the interview was a bit more informal, as we switched into talking about extracurricular interests. The interviewer began talking about some of his personal extracurricular adventures during his time at CBS, and I had to steer the interview back into my court. I did this by talking about how I planned to start an extracurricular club at Columbia.
At the end of the interview, I said that I really wanted to attend Columbia and the interviewer said that he would do his best to write a good evaluation for me. About three weeks later I received an offer from the school.
