Hi guys,
Quick update from me: completed both my interviews last week.
Interview 1 was an awesome interview, we took an hour than went to get lunch together to continue our conversation. Interviewer stopped short of literally saying he would recommend me but he said my story was very strong and that I had great leadership potential. Some questions I remember:
- Why INSEAD?
- Why an MBA?
- What other schools have you applied to?
- He asked specifically about my industry experience and how I had progressed in my career (I have a lot of micro-promotions over 5 years)
- He asked about a time I had failed and how I overcame my struggle
- What are your weaknesses?
All in all, this was a great 1.5-2 hour conversation. I really enjoyed the experience and we had a very organic conversation, made me very excited to go to INSEAD!
Interview 2 was equally awesome, but in a different way. My interviewer was significantly more senior (SVP at a public company) and appeared to play more of a bad cop role and was less responsive to my answers (didn't show as much emotion). Definitely a more challenging exercise but I believe I did pretty well - he was almost 16 years out of his INSEAD experience and was definitely reminiscing his experience a lot. He also asked some more odd-ball questions that I had a tougher time with:
- What book are you currently reading (coincidentally I am reading an INSEAD-book right now
) - What blogs do you read?
- How does your company help other companies and how could you help mine?
- How do you learn from your mistakes, what process do you follow?
In addition to these questions there were some of the standard Why INSEAD, Why MBA, Where else are you applying type questions.
Overall, I think my interviews went better than I had expected although I probably could have done better on my second interview. Excited to hear back from INSEAD in 2-3 weeks!!