Round 1 interview with an alum in my region, lasted a bit more than 2 hours.
This was by far the most difficult interview of all the ones I have done. I was given only 1 interviewer choice, I contacted him by email and he responded a couple of days later. We set up a meeting at his office. I met with him in the morning-he had asked me to dress “smart casual.”
This was not a blind interview. My interviewer knew my application really well. Also he had been selected as my interviewer because we had similar goals, although a very different background-so he knew what I was talking about regarding my goals, both short and long-term.
The interview was really conversational, and we started by talking about small businesses in general (we both work for small businesses) and how we were coping in the current environment. I have to say it’s really hard to list the questions because he was very talkative and I had to fight my way in to speak-so he did not so much ask questions as much as I placed the different points I wanted to make throughout the conversation, but still big themes emerged:
- Walk me through your resume. What was your school about? (my undergrad background is a tad complicated)
- Leadership: experiences, coping with teams
- Goals, how LBS will help you get there?
- Have you applied to others schools? Which ones? Why? [Note that he had in-depth knowledge of other schools and asked me very specific questions about why I had applied to those schools and he kept pushing about what was important to me in an MBA and how the strengths of each school were different)
- How my short term goals fit with my long term goals: he pushed a lot about that and the direction I have chosen. It’s really important to demonstrate how everything fits together.
At some point he gave me a topic for my presentation and he asked that I don’t share the topic with anyone so I won’t, but it was a general topic that did not require any particular knowledge. I had 7 minutes to prepare and 5 minutes to present. It did require some serious thinking and was very concrete. I had limited ideas about the topic so I tried to make a somewhat funny presentation while still getting key points across. I think it worked! They are just trying to assess whether you can speak English correctly, can give an organized presentation and be convincing. The content really doesn’t matter.
The interviewer loved the school and his goal was to see 1. if I would fit there, 2. if I really wanted to go there.
At the end he told me he would recommend my candidacy to LBS… Final response in a couple of weeks. Good luck to all!
