Lauder Interview
Had my interview in a meeting room at the alumnus’ office.. thankfully we stopped to grab some water before going in to the meeting room.
Interviewer started off by telling me a little bit about his background and then asked me to do the same. The interview overall was pretty laid-back and conversational and I asked questions throughout the interview as well as at the end. Specific questions I was asked included:
- Tell me about yourself.
- What are your short term and long term goals? – We discussed these in more depth – he had some follow up questions.
- Tell me about a multi-cultural challenge I experienced
- Why Lauder?
- Why not just Wharton? The MBA is already so well rounded and intensive and he mentioned some programs that Wharton has for international exposure.
- What were some areas I’d be interested in researching for the two research papers?
- How would I contribute to the program?
Those were the main themes of the interview but there was a lot of probing about why I wanted to do the Lauder program and how it would benefit me. E.g. he mentioned that most people in the Indian corporate world can speak English so how will learning Hindi help me.
Overall, I was pretty happy with the interview although I think I did have some minor goof-ups here and there. I might have tried to push my case a little too hard in the end because he pointed out that he can only submit the results of the interview but that ad com make the final decision on admission.
Wharton Interview
Four hours later I had my Wharton interview with another alumnus in his office as well. Another laid back interview and a wonderfully pleasant and jovial interviewer. He explained the new interview process in detail and even read out all six questions to me before we formally started the interview. After he read all six questions we chatted for a bit and I asked him about what role the interview played in the admissions process. After we were done chatting, he read out all six questions again and told me I could answer either of the two questions from each category and in any order. It was really helpful that he let me pick which question I wanted to answer from each category since I definitely had stronger stories for certain situations than others. So then we went through all three questions I picked and followed the same drill as everyone else: timed, lots of probing questions, lots of note writing. I guess 20-25 minutes later we were done and then we chatted some more about Philly and Wharton. He told me more than once I did a good job on all questions so hopefully I get a good rating.
