Scheduling the interview
I received my notification that I had been selected to interview in early January, about 5 weeks after the Round 2 deadline. A few days later I received an email with my interviewers’ names and contact information. I sent them each an email with my availability in the next month. I proposed dates starting a week later to give myself at least a week to prepare for my first interview since this was my first business school interview. I proposed quite a few dates on Fridays and the weekend since I am only in town Friday-Sunday. After several iterations of scheduling due to last minute conflicts on my part and my interviewers’ parts, I had 3 weeks before my first interview.
Preparing for the interview
For preparation I compiled past interview questions from ClearAdmit to find out what INSEAD-specific questions might be asked. I had also networked with quite a few INSEAD current students and alumni before I submitted my application so I reached out to them to see if they had additional questions they remembered from their interviews. In addition to the typical range of questions, I saw that INSEAD interviewers were interested in your international experience, evidence that you have a genuine interest in the school, and why you would choose INSEAD over a top American school. I spent time reviewing my resume and preparing for the typical questions I might be asked by first writing out a few examples and then by practicing in front of a mirror. I was fortunate to have quite a few people at my company who had recently graduated from business school so I ran through a practice interview in person with one of them.
In the interview notification email you are asked to send your interviewers the first 6 pages of your application which basically has most of the information that a resume would have. My second interviewer asked me if I could send my essays as well so I sent them to her as well.
I looked up both of my interviewers on Linked In etc. to try to learn a little bit more about each of them. Both of them were very different as one worked at a large bank and the other worked at a small advertising company. Both had graduated about 5 years ago so I tailored some of my questions for them to ask about how INSEAD helped them get to their current position etc.
First interview
My first interviewer was fairly formal. Since my interviewer only had the first pages of my application I brought a copy of my resume for her to use if she wanted to. She asked me to walk through my resume. As I was walking through it I set it up so that I could start to answer the inevitable “why MBA, why now” questions. She probed me a little on my motivations for going to business school and then asked why I thought INSEAD would be the best place to help me reach those goals. I made sure to weave in the international nature of the program and some of the unique things about the school that made sense for my family situation and short and long term goals that I had already touched on briefly as I walked through my resume. As I was talking through my motivations, I asked her a little bit about her experiences to gauge whether what I was saying resonated with her and to start to make the interview more like a conversation and less like me just talking. As I was walking through my resume she stopped me a few times and asked my when I had to work on a team and when I had to deal with conflict. Even though I had better teamwork stories for other parts of my application than what she specifically asked about, I was glad I had prepared a few examples for each of the typical types of questions.
She then asked me a little bit about a specific international experience that was in my application. She used that as a segway to ask me about a time when I felt culture shock. I unfortunately hadn’t prepared this question for this specific experience since I hadn’t experienced much culture shock during that experience, so I had to think quickly on the spot. I then asked her if she had found her initial days at INSEAD to be a shock to move the focus away from me 🙂
She then asked me if I had any questions for her, and I had prepared a few in addition to the ones I had been sprinkling in to the conversation as we went along. Finally she asked me if there was anything that I found intolerable which I thought was sort of a strange question, so I had to think of something on the spot. My interviewer was very nice and offered to show me her trading floor since I hadn’t ever seen one before. I felt pretty good coming out of the interview, aside from the couple of times where I was sort of caught off guard. All in all it was 30-40 minutes long.
Second Interview
My second interview was very informal and very conversational. My interviewer was in advertising and we didn’t dwell on my industry specific career goals and she focused more on how I thought INSEAD would help me. Since she had read all of my essays I made sure to prepare different stories and to make sure I reviewed everything I wrote. She mainly asked my why I needed to get an MBA and why was I interested in INSEAD- I gave two of my main reasons and then she pushed me for more. She then asked me about some of my experiences with French culture (since I had mentioned some of that in my application). She asked me what I did in my free time and I gave 3 examples (one volunteering, and two fun activities). She then asked me if I had any questions for her and I asked her about her background since she had an unusual background. All in all it was only 30 minutes long and I had a very good feeling about it since it was a very relaxed and conversational interview. She emailed me after I was accepted which I thought was really nice.
