MIT MBA Round 2 / Off-campus (Seattle) / Adcom / Accepted!!! (April 6th, 2009)
I was notified of my interview fairly late and only had a few days to prepare. I was *extremely* nervous due to everything I was reading about MIT interviews and how insanely difficult they are. I was expecting a barrage of questions and then probing on everything I said... but the questions really weren't too bad, and his style was laid back. We talked a lot about my nonprof stuff which probably took up a good 10 min (and helped me calm down too). The interviewer was very, very casual and genuinely interested in what I had to say. We got into a rhythm early on and the conversation flowed like gravy...
Here are the general questions:
transcripts?
recent achievements/promotions? (showed him some community awards)
tell me about yourself. what do you do at work? (i work in tech and brought in some product samples. he seemed to like the fact that i brought something to "show and tell". this also ate up some time and allowed me to go into engineer mode and ramble a bunch of tech stuff
what do you enjoy outside of work? (talked about my love of snowboarding/baseball/nonprof)
tell me about a time when you had to convince someone to follow your plan
tell me a time when you thought outside of the box
why mba? why sloan?
are you sure you need an mba? you already have a lot of "mba" experience.. (wasn't really prepared for this one so watch out for it..)
I studied by arranging the questions here into different categories, then choosing different stories based on the category for each question. I probably had 7-9 different scenarios ready but only talked about 2 of them in depth. Most of the follow up questions are straightforward and natural: why did you do it that way? any difficulties with people? how would you do it differently next time? what's the greatest thing you learned from the experience? etc etc
Probably the best advice is to be yourself and pretend like you're talking to a friend. I even slipped up a few times and said "man" just like I was talking to a classmate. Another thing I'd do is keep your answers short (maybe 1-2 min). When I rambled he looked away but when i said something interesting he would nod and write. If you're from tech like me, try to pick stories that have nothing to do with work. Remember you are trying to show why you'd be a good business leader and not a good IT/tech guy. He seemed to be more interested in my nonprof/community stories (he was even interested in my snowboarding experiences). Just show passion, conviction and be humble about your accomplishments. Another tip: show up early. I was fortunate enough to overhear the interview before me which helped calm me down a bit and get a feel for his interviewing style. Finally, when the interview was over I asked for feedback (i didn't ask outright but did so in a creative and non-obvious way). He basically said I did fine which made me feel a lot better about the whole ordeal.
The interview lasted ~40 min. I was accepted Round 2. |
