I just finished HBS on-campus interview today and share with you guys my experience.
I got to the Admissions Office at around 10am and was given a package. Then I and other 4 applicants were brought by a student to a classroom and attended a class. I had a look at the case method by myself and I thought it was good. The atmosphere was vivid and the discussion was heated. (A pretty girl wore a bunny hat and ate bananas in class.) The professor played a guiding role and the students talked for roughly 70% of time.
After class, I took the interview for about 30 minutes. The interviewer didn’t have a list of questions. He only looked at my resume and asked me questions. The interview was a casual friendly conversation, not challenging or pressing as I imagined before. I summarized his questions in following three aspects:
Leadership
How do you think about leadership? How do you implement your idea of leadership? What do you do if you have differences with your teammates or superiors? What’s your long-term career plan back to China?
Contribution
How will you take use of your experience to contribute to HBS? How will you use your lawyer’s perspective in your MBA study? How can you actively participate and contribute to the case study method?
Difficulties
How will you deal with the MBA study since you don’t have a business background? How will you deal with numbers since you didn’t learn advanced mathematics in university?
I started my interview at 12pm and didn’t catch the student lunch. I took the information session in the afternoon. A second year student repeated all the main points same with those on HBS website.
All the questions were closely related with what I said. For example, he asked about my lawyer’s perspective because I said my undergraduate major was law. When I tried to connect my work experience with the case study method, he asked for some details. He also seemed to be interested in my undergraduate extracurricular activities and asked me to prove my leadership potentials from these activities.
My feelings and tips: HBS just wanted to use the interview to know the applicant better. So it is better to pay close attention to yourself and be familiar with your application materials. He didn’t ask why MBA or why HBS? He focused on how I could perform if enrolled. I think it is not necessary to remember some details of HBS and show off how you are familiar with this school. I think it is really important to focus on yourself and find the points where you match with and contribute to the HBS. Moreover, since the first characteristics they emphasize is leadership, it will be useful to stress your achievement in this regard. You needn’t have some leader’s title, but just tell something in which you play a leading role. If you don’t have business background, be prepared to say something that this will not negatively influence your future MBA study.
I also took a telephone interview with Ohio Fisher on Feb.19.
Before that the Director of Admissions Office called me and told me that they decided to give me preliminary admission and invited me to attend an alumni dinner party. I found that I was the only applicant in that party. I can feel that they want me to join. Because of this, I didn’t feel nervous about the telephone interview at all. The interview asked me regular questions such as:
why MBA
why Fisher
my leadership experiences
I just said what I wrote in my essays. He also asked:
why I choose to apply for Fisher since I also applied for Emory? What did I think was the difference between Fisher and Emory?
This was the only question I didn’t expect and I just briefly said several “selling points” of Fisher. He seemed to be satisfied with the interview and asked me to join Fisher again at the end of interview.
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