MBA Admissions Interview

So this is the final piece. You have worked very had at your application. You have done due diligence in targeting business schools. You have written killer essays that highlighted your sense of purpose and accomplishments. You have awesome letters of recommendation. The moment you have worked very hard over the past few months(years?) arrive. You have received a call for an interview!! Congratulations! For most schools this means that they think you are a great fit and you have the necessary skills and capabilities to make the most of your MBA at a top 5 business school.

Being called for an interview from a top 5 business school is an awesome feeling. It means that you have already accomplished a great deal in your life and you should be proud of where you are and what you have achieved. But there is one more final step to fulfill your dream. That is the interview. The interview is where the admissions committee validate everything that you wrote about. That is when they evaluate your communication skills, your presentation skills and most importantly your people skills. The ability to WOW someone. The ability to impress someone so much that they want to see you again, they cant wait for the next meeting.

Everything that you worked so hard on is meaningless if you take the interview lightly. First of all do not wait for the interview call to start working on some of the interviewing skills I am going to talk about. These are not applicable only to an MBA interview. They are very useful in life and will definitely help during an MBA admissions interview. I will have a small section in the end that is specific to an MBA admissions interview. Everything else should be worked on much earlier. You cant pick these up in a matter of weeks. The final section specific to the MBA admissions interview can be learned and applied in a matter of weeks.

1. Spoken English

I could be wrong here, but what I believe is that your ability to speak in English is very important when you consider gaining admission to a top 5 MBA program. What does it mean to speak English well?

a. You do not make grammatical errors. You do not make pronunciation errors. This is generally not a problem for native English speakers, but for the rest of the world consistent effort has to be put in to be able to speak well. You may need to join a class to pick up this skill.

b. Communicating emotion. The ability to WOW someone is really about communicating emotion well. Picking certain words that strike the chords of your listener’s heart. This skill takes a while to develop. You may need to listen to great speakers and listen to the words they chose when they speak. Then you need to practice it in your daily life and gauge the effect they have on the people you meet everyday.

2. Structure

When someone asks you a question, how do you reply? Do you have a clear beginning, a body and an end? Most discussions in your daily life are really questions to which you need to answer. However, in your daily life you can answer without a structure because the listener may ask you questions to clarify what you said. But for an MBA interview, you get one shot with a question. Within 30 seconds to a minute you need to communicate a tonne of stuff. The only way to do that would be to clearly define a beginning, a body and a conclusion to every answer you give. This makes sure that the interviewer understands very well what you are talking about. Again the ability to structure your responses takes time and needs to be practiced. Joining a toastmasters club and practicing speaking will help. Or just go for many mock interviews and see how you are doing and work on the feedback.

3. Comfort

The interviewer will try and make you comfortable, usually by starting with small talk, things that are easy to answer to. But then there will be some tough questions. The only way to navigate through tough questions is by being very comfortable at the interview table. A few weeks of preparation will not be enough if you want to sit at an top 5 business school MBA interview, the biggest opportunity of your life,  and not feel nervous at all. You need to have been in such nerve racking situations before. My advice is to reach out to people, in high positions and talk to them casually. Interview with tough companies. Interview for positions that you know you are clearly not a fit for. Meet people you have never met before and try to impress them, get them excited about your skill set and what you have done.

This takes many years to develop. The ability to talk to someone you have never met before, feel completely comfortable sitting at the interview table, and for the most important interview you have had so far. But you absolutely have to have this ability! Because otherwise you may come across as nervous. Which could be interpreted as you were telling a lie. If you are very nervous, you may not be thinking straight and you may not say the right thing.

You also need to smile and enjoy yourself while you are there. The interviewer really need to feel that you are comfortable in such a setting. Here is the dirty little secret. The top business schools admit students that they know are already successful or going to be very successful irrespective of the MBA!!!

MBA admissions interview

This is the section that is applicable to MBA interviews. You already know this, but I have to repeat it to ensure completeness. Research the school very well. Know the clubs you would like to be part of, the professors whose courses you want to attend and the activities you would like to participate. Since I interviewed  only with MIT, their interviews are behavioral. They ask you about your accomplishments and situations where you exhibited certain qualities that they feel are required to be part of their program. The way I prepared for this interview is as follows.

On a sheet of paper I wrote down all the qualities that a leader should possess like: good ethics, perseverance, hard work, knowledge, leadership skills, managerial skills, personal strengths, awareness of personal weaknesses, people skills, communication skills etc etc. I also numbered these qualities. I had about 20 such points. Then I thought about the life over the last 5 – 10 years and thought of various incidents that shaped who I have become. Then against each of those incidents I put down the number(s) corresponding the qualities or skills from the above required skill set that I exhibited. For example during incident A in my life I exhibited qualities 1, 5, 6, and 10. It was essentially a mapping. I had about 30 such incidents that I could talk about.

Then I read through some commonly asked questions and tried answering them in my mind. My approach was essentially to try and understand what set of qualities the interviewer is really asking for and the best story to pick so that I can cover all the qualities and add a few more that she wasn’t expecting. It was an awesome approach because I had ready answers to all the questions she asked at my interview because I had performed this mapping. I knew which story would be most effective for which question.

Finally when she asked me if there was anything else I would like to add, I thought of all the qualities that I covered during my interview. I found out that I couldnt cover a couple of them because the questions that were asked did not demand I talk about them. So I picked these to talk about at the end of the interview. Now I was confident that it was my best performance because I covered every quality that they were looking for from a candidate.

I hope these articles help an aspiring MBA candidate, you, to present yourself better during the application process. Note that I haven’t talked anything about the content of the stories. Finally its the content that gets you in. The choices you made throughout your life and the things that you have accomplished is what is the most important aspect. No one can tell you what you need to do. That’s what makes you unique. I have just talked about a logical way to identify those incidents and present them well. Good Luck!

Finally don’t ever lie. It is not worth it. Just be yourself; that’s the most important part. Remember that this is a process of finding the right fit both for the school and for yourself. If you lie, you miss out on the accuracy of that vetting process and in the long run you suffer.