Here is a previous version of
peaceyall's great
collection of interview questions. We have added around 80 new interview questions asked recently at various BSchools. You will also find few Wharton TBD debriefs at the end.
Sources: GMATClub Bschool threads, GMATClub
BSchool reviews,
Rhyme's interview guide,
Accepted.com.
Undergrad
1. Why did you choose your undergraduate major?
2. Why course X at college Y?
3. Why did you choose to attend [university]?
4. Tell me the key highlights of your undergraduate time.
5. Tell me about a standout academic experience.
6. What was your favorite class in college?
7. Which subjects did you find most challenging and which ones you found most difficult?
Career Progression
1. Why did you take your first job?
2. Discuss your career progression
3. Walk me through your professional career.
4. Significant accomplishments in your career
5. Tell me an important thing that you learned from your work and school experiences.
6. How did you choose your job after college?
7. Tell me a decision you made in your career you wish you could have done differently.
8. What challenges do you think you will face as you move through this career path?
9. What would be your dream job (if you had no considerations for money etc.)?
10. Explain your career path to date; why did you choose the jobs you have had?
Current Job / Work Experience
1. Explain what your company does in plain language
2. Tell me what you do in your daily job
3. What kinds of issues do you deal with day-to-day?
4. Tell me about your job. How is your most recent project going?
5. What is your legacy at your job going to be?
6. Who is your mentor at work?
7. How do you work with people from different cultures?
8. Cultural awareness and questions about working in different cultures?
9. How many people have worked for you (juniors), in what capacity and how did you manage them?
10. Why are you good at your job? Why aren’t you?
11. What do you do at work?
12. What do you/don’t you like regarding your job?
13. What exactly do you do at your current job, how is the group structured, do you have any direct reports?
14. Tell me a time you made/influenced a change to an organization / business / team.
15. What would your global experience add to [School]?
16. Take me through an interesting project you have worked on recently.
17. What do you like about your job? What do you NOT like about your job?
18. Describe a time that you disagreed with your boss
19. If I promoted you today at your job, what change would you implement?
20. Take me through an interesting project you have worked on recently.
21. What would you do to improve your company (pretend you've been promoted)?
22. Describe a typical work day
23. What is most frustrating at work?
Why MBA?
1. Why are you applying to business school?
2. Do you think you could achieve what you want without an MBA?
3. What brought you here? (applying for business school)
4. Why the MBA? Why now?
5. Why an MBA even though you majored in business for undergrad?
6. Backup plan if I don’t get in
7. What are some weaknesses in your skills you’d like to strengthen with an MBA?
8. Concrete skills I'm looking to get out of an MBA
9. What is your ideal position after MBA?
10. For an entrepreneur: Why do you want to leave your business (even though it’s a profitable venture) and Why come to [School]?
11. Plan B if I do not get recruited in the company I want?
12. Why are you interested in a general MBA program?
13. What specific skills do you want to get out of this program?
14. With all of your experience, why do you need an MBA?
15. When did you realize that you wanted to go to business school, and why?
Why School?
1. Why does this school appeal to you?
2. What criteria do you have for selecting B schools? (Give me 3 points)
3. What if you get selected to all the schools in which you have applied?
4. What does [School] mean to you?
5. How has your past experiences or qualities prepared you for [School]?
6. Have you thought of other schools?
7. Where else have you applied and what was the result?
8. How many schools are you applying?
9. Why not just stay in India and do a one year MBA from ISB? Won’t that be easier? (This was asked to an Indian applicant applying to a 2-year full time MBA program in US)
10. What activities do you plan on being involved with at [School]?
11. Which clubs are you interested in [School]?
12. What classes do you plan to take?
13. How will you contribute to [School]?
14. Which other MBA programs you had applied to? (Why are you not applying to school X)?
15. Do you have any particular classes or professors in mind?
16. Are there any professors you know of at [School]?
17. Have I spoken to alumni and / or current students and who are they? (He didn’t care about names rather how do I know them, etc.)
18. What would be your legacy be at [School]
Other MBA Topics
1. Has the application process helped you reflect?
2. If you wanted the admissions committee to know one thing that you didn’t feel like you could convey in your application, what would you want me to tell them?
3. What’s changed since you submitted your application, or tell me about something you’re proud of.
4. You are one of a large pool of applicants. What differentiates you?
5. What do you think should be the criteria of selection for the MBA class?
6. Why do you want to be in senior executive role?
7. Would you have any regrets if the market tanked next year and you were unable to get a premier job?
8. What part of the MBA program will you struggle with most?
9. Activities at SCHOOL you would participate in. What you can bring to them?
10. What do you think will be your biggest challenge at SCHOOL?
11. What will be the biggest challenge for you in adjusting to life at SCHOOL?
12. What do you see yourself doing for your summer internship after your first year?
13. What do you specifically have to bring to the classroom versus the many others who have done XXX career?
14. What would you uniquely add to the class?
15. What do you think the risks are for SCHOOL if we admit you?
16. What would you do if not accepted?
Personal Characteristics
1. Tell me who you are.
2. Discuss yourself
3. Tell me about a time when you made an improvement.
4. Example of time when you felt effective.
5. Describe a time in which you had to adapt.
6. Describe your learning style
7. What do you look for in a classmate?
8. What is it that drives you?
9. How did I prioritize when I have to do or choose among many things?
10. What is an activity you are involved in? Why is it important to you?
11. What are some strengths you have that will help your future endeavors?
12. What are your weaknesses?
13. Tell me something surprising about yourself
14. Name three words or phrases to describe yourself to others
15. What contributions would you make to a group?
16. What do you do to relieve stress?
17. It's two years after graduation, what three words would your team members use to describe you?
18. How would co-workers describe you? / 3 words that your boss/colleague/juniors describe you
19. What are some positive things your coworkers would say about you?
20. What are some negative things your coworkers could possibly say about you?
21. After your first semester at [School], what would your study group teammates say about you? (One positive and one negative)
22. A book I'd recommend that I've read recently.
23. Name three qualities that do NOT describe you
24. What distinguishes you from others?
25. What are people most surprised to learn about you?
26. How comfortable are you speaking up in front of large groups of people?
27. Why do you think you are successful at what you do?
28. Misconception about you/first impressions
29. If you could write a book on anything what would it be on?
30. What kind of books do you like to read?
31. What are your extracurricular interests?
32. What makes you unique?
33. On a scale of to 1 to 10, compared to your peers, rank yourself in analytical ability. In drive? In confidence? In being better than people?
34. How do you think you are as a contributor to the community?
35. What do you like to do in your free time outside of work?
36. What is a compliment you’ve heard about yourself in a work setting that you are particularly proud of?
37. Talk about a time that I was given feedback.
Career Aspirations
1. What do you want to do (in regard to business function, industry, location)?
2. What excites you about the field you are interested in?
3. Describe your career aspirations
4. What are the career steps you see after [Business School]?”
5. Do you know what consulting companies look for while hiring candidates? (Had mentioned consulting as post-MBA goal)
6. What are your long- and short-term goals? Why?
7. What goals have you been working toward either personally or professionally in the past 1-2 years?
8. Talk about experiences you have had at work.
9. Discuss any experience you have had abroad.
10. How were your experiences in [country I had international experiences in]?
11. What challenges do you think you will face as you move through this career path?
12. How you will accomplish your career goals?
13. What is your goal in 3, 5 years time?
14. What strategic issues would you want to tackle if you were running a company in your chosen field?
15. What do you NOT want to do?
General Leadership
1. How do you define success?
2. How are you a leader in your job
3. What is your leadership style?
4. How do you show leadership at work?
5. Is Leadership and Management the same?
6. How would you describe your leadership style; collaborative or direct?
7. What are the pros/cons of your style?
8. What leader in history do you admire most?
9. What makes someone a leader?
10. What are the qualifications of a good leader?
11. How do you motivate someone?
Leadership Stories
1. Tell me about a time you helped someone else succeed.
2. Tell me about a time you helped someone else develop
3. An inspiring leader and why?
4. Give examples of how you have demonstrated leadership inside and outside the work environment
5. Time when you've been challenged as a leader and what you learned from it.
6. Give an example of leadership that you didn't discuss in your essays
7. Tell me about a specific situation in your professional career where you solved an important problem.
8. Tell me about a time when you exhibited leadership.
9. How had your leadership style evolved from Position X through today?
10. Give a leadership example outside of work, after college.
11. Tell me about a leadership experience that you did not mention in your essays.
12. Since submitting your application, how have you continued to take leadership roles?
13. What would your colleagues say are your strengths and weaknesses as a leader?
14. Give me your leadership resume, starting when you feel is appropriate and demonstrating your growth as a leader.
15. Give an example of when you took the initiative.
16. Give another example of a situation in which you showed leadership in the face of adversity.
17. Tell me about a decision you have faced, not that you necessarily regret but I am more interested in the decision point.
Lessons Learned
1. What did you learn from experience XYZ (that was discussed in my essays)
2. Tell me about a time you had to deal with conflict in the workplace
3. Time when you've been challenged as a leader and what you learned from it.
Team Environment
1. Have you worked in a team environment? What were your contributions to the effort?
2. How would you begin working with a new team?
3. What would you do if a team member wasn't pulling his own weight?
4. How do you work in teams?
5. Can you tell me about a time someone disagreed with you or you didn’t get along with a team member?
6. What are the top 5 things you look for in a team?
7. What would your colleagues miss least about you?
8. What would be the greatest strength/weakness that you would bring to a group (i.e. learning team)?
9. What role do you usually take in a team setting?
10. When did you lead a team? What is the hardest part of leading a team
11. Tell me about how you manage teams
12. How do you create accountability and create a strong team?
13. Tell me about a leadership experience where you had to depend upon another person/other people for success
14. Give an example of when you had to lead people?
Challenging Situation
1. Tell me about a time you’ve received criticism.
2. Tell me about a time you saw an opportunity someone else didn’t? Sometime you had to get buy-in from someone for your idea? when others weren’t accepting your idea?
3. Tell me about a time you had to deal with two conflicting parties.
4. How do you typically communicate bad news?
5. Tell me about a time you felt blocked from achieving a goal and how you reacted.
6. Tell me about a time you had to change someone’s mind?
7. Describe a situation where you brought an idea forward, and it failed.
8. Talk about a time you encountered a problem you had to overcome.
9. Time when a leader fell short and you had to step up and lead.
10. Time when you wanted to give up and how you motivated yourself to keep going.
11. Tell me about a time when you had to interact with people in a difficult situation.
12. Tell me about a time when you were challenged at work.
13. Time when you wanted to give up and how you motivated yourself to keep going.
14. Tell me about an instance where you had to negotiate something on the job. How did you convince your counterparts?
Failure
1. Biggest failure? Second largest, third largest failure
2. Tell me about the time when you let your team down.
3. Describe a situation when something went totally awry
4. What do you consider your biggest fault is at work, why do you think you have it and what are you doing about it?
5. Have you planned something that did not go through?
6. Tell me a decision you made in your career you wish you could have done differently.
7. Tell me about a time where you failed at your first job
Ethical Decision
1. Talk about a time when your values were challenged and you had to consult your moral compass.
2. When was your belief challenged?
3. What part did you play in the ethical concern you mentioned in your essay? How did the higher ups react to this situation?
Difficult People
1. Tell me about a time when you developed a person / dealt with a difficult person at work. What did you do?
2. Tell me about a time you faced conflict at work- either between you and another person or between two co-workers and how did you deal with it.
3. Tell me about a time when you had a bad leader.
4. Give me an instance where you handled a difficult subordinate at work
Other
1. How was growing up in a country like yours? Tell me about it.
2. What is your typical day like?
3. Tell me about your monthly Astronomy meet-ups.
4. Summarize and talk about your non-profit exposure.
5. Extracurricular activities, the reason for those particular activities and how do you plan to continue involving yourself in the community during MBA at [School].
6. What is the best piece of constructive feedback that you have received and how are you working on it?
7. Describe another situation where you applied the learning from the above feedback.
8. One thing you regretted.
9. Tell me about how your transition from country X to country Y. What was it like?
10. A latest dilemma I had between good options.
11. Tell me about a time when you saw the solution before someone else?
12. Do you have any decisions you regret?
13. Why did you pick your recommenders?
14. What do you think your recommenders said about your strengths & weaknesses?
15. What are your strengths and weaknesses?
16. What would your colleagues say is your strengths and weaknesses as a leader?
17. What accomplishment are you most proud of?
18. What do you like to do for fun?
19. How did you get here? (I had a pretty long journey to the interview)
Caught off guard
1. How is Canada different economically than the U.S.? (Applicant was Canadian)
2. Tell us something about your country that we wouldn't know?
3. My views about the role of media in the news.
Closing
1. Is there anything you would like to ask me/us?
2. What questions do you have for me?
3. Anything you wished I had asked?
Questions Asked to Interviewer
1. Asked my interviewer about what would she do if doing MBA again.
2. How best can I utilize my time from now to start of MBA?
Wharton Team Based Discussion (TBD)
1. There were about 20 people interviewing in my time slot that day. We all chatted prior to the interview but didn’t know who would be in which group. 35-minute team based discussion started with 1 min for everyone in the group to go around and say their idea. My group had 6 people in it – 3 women, 3 men. Everyone had their pitch memorized, with some much more detailed/specific than others. My idea happened to include a few themes from two ideas that were said before me, so I mentioned that when I gave my pitch, and the group decided to go with my idea. I tried to drive the conversation as best I could from there. Everyone was very cordial and the toughest part was to work in all the ideas that people were putting out there. It was difficult to take notes during the discussion, but one person volunteered to get everyone’s ideas down, which was very helpful. Halfway through the discussion he recapped what our conference looked like and what gaps we still needed to fill in. Overall we struggled a bit with time management but were able to give a coherent albeit rushed conference presentation. It was a much more pleasant experience than I expected – my advice is to come up with a topic and format quickly because a lot of time will be spent hearing everyone’s ideas out and figuring out how to best incorporate them so that everyone has a piece of the conference.
2. There really wasn’t much a nervous energy since three of us out of the five candidates in the room had met beforehand and practiced a mock session. The ad-com wasn’t especially strict and no timer was provided so we kept track using a clock on the wall. We gave our one-minute introductions (none of us elected to talk about our background/undergrad school) on the topic and then someone had the bright idea to use the whiteboard located in the room. He started taking notes on our ideas and we had someone else keep time. We then started discussing our ideas and split it up as 5 to 6 minutes to introduce our ideas, 10 minutes to evaluate our idea based on our own chosen specific criteria, 10 – 15 minutes to discuss the idea and 5 minutes to present it to the adcom.
3. For the team based discussion, everyone introduces themselves briefly (20-30 seconds) including the second year students, then the current students outline the instructions for the discussion and then began the timer. I would say it was fairly easy to figure out who did well and who did not in my group of six. Three of the six were very shy and barely spoke after giving their one minute pitch. Don’t let that happen to you! If you are shy, practice with as many people as you can before interview day. If you were granted an interview it was because the school was very interested in you, have confidence, practice your heart out with other people, and don’t let your nerves ruin your interview. That being said, there was also one person in the group that seemed overly controlling and would not give up on their idea for the prompt. Don’t be that person either. Have a great idea, think it through, but also realize that there is a high likelihood your idea will be scrapped anyway. Be ready to be flexible. The person in my group who I felt did the best had an interesting inclusive idea, spoke up frequently but also frequently asked everyone else for feedback and opinions, and most importantly, came off as a nice person. The interview went by in the blink of an eye, so enjoy it and relax.
4. My student interview included the standard Wharton group interview and a brief one-on-one with the second-year after. The group interview was with ~six other applicants, with two second-year moderators/observers. We were emailed a prompt with our interview invitation (prompt: acting as a student at Wharton, plan a conference covering the topic of your choice); at the interview, we were tasked with picking one person’s idea, forming the details around the conference, and presenting our proposal to our student observers. Everyone was cordial and clearly on their best behavior, although I think there are a few strategies that tend to be most successful here (I have several friends at Wharton and have compared my experience to theirs):
i) the mostly silent observer – this saves you from being overly domineering or annoying, which you absolutely do not want – just occasionally offer supportive feedback to your teammates and come off as an all-around good guy; or
ii) the leader – this is trickier, as you do NOT want to be too bossy, but there does tend to be one or two people per group that keep an eye on the time and make sure you end up with a deliverable to present by the deadline.
I chose the second route, because I didn’t see my group finishing on time otherwise… you’ll need to judge how your group is progressing and make a game-time decision. My advice is that first and foremost, this is a character test: do not be cocky, do not dominate the conversation, do not promote only your own ideas, etc. Common sense will save the day here. And, for what it’s worth, I did very little prep on the prompt – all you need is a ~1 minute pitch, and if it sounds too rehearsed you will be labeled as the annoying candidate in your group (mine definitely had one). You’ll also need a ~20 second intro (undergrad school, current job, city, etc). Go early and make friends in the waiting room; always good to have allies of course.
5. The first was the Wharton Team Based Discussion (TBD). I arrived about ten minutes early. This gave me time to socialize with my team ahead of time, and I can’t recommend this strongly enough. Knowing each person’s name as well as a bit about them made our overall discussion much simpler. Logistically it was very similar to most others’ experience. The two 2nd year students introduced themselves, had each of us introduce ourself (again), then we each had a minute to pitch our ideas. Our seating arrangements were predetermined and I happened to have a great view of the timer so I volunteered to keep us on track in that regard. Everyone did very well with keeping to under 1 minute, and there was a loose theme that everyone touched on in their idea. We decided to strengthen that theme and make it the general topic of our proposed conference. With about 4 minutes left we pitched the entire thing and ended about 30 seconds early – perfect!
6. Group dynamics: very hard to tell what really matters. I, for instance, made a huge dumb mistake (User admitted to Wharton) during mine (literally said something that made no sense at the time, but quickly came back saying nevermind, it doesn't make sense, back to previous point) and it all worked out. I do think that you should try and "embody" a role play, be it the leader, the conciliator, the challenger, etc. Take a stance instead of being lost and going with the flow. Don't show off, it's not necessary. Be yourself on how you behave and push yourself to take a stance on the topic being discussed. In my group, "the leader" was admitted, the challenger wasn't and the conciliator was. That was not the case for other groups so...hard to tell.
7. My team consisted of four other applicants (five of us in total, two male, three female). It was a diverse group which I tried to inspire with enthusiasm and drive - the chemistry was OK but not amazing. I was first to give my introduction and suggestion for a project. I spent 1-2 hours preparing this, but mainly so I had a lot of data to back it up in case everyone liked my idea. Everyone had clearly spent more than an hour researching their introduction and it took a while to flesh out a workable idea. We chose to pursue another person's idea which meant the discussion quickly moved away from my chosen topic, so it was good not to be too attached to it. The conversation moved naturally and politely from person to person. I was conscious that I should not be too silent or too vocal, but it never felt strained to jump in with an idea, some data point relevant to the discussion or even just to say "that's a great idea, X".
As more than one person was keeping time and also reminding the team of the main deliverables, I chose to step up once or twice to give a recap of the situation and prioritize our next steps. Consequently, we ended up with a detailed conclusion which I presented on the whiteboard (there was a lot of flexibility on how to present our idea).
The Admissions Director was a lot stricter with time than when I interviewed on campus. Furthermore, my previous experience didn't involve a formal presentation of our conclusion, whereas it was required this time around.
My main tips are to be prepared for your introduction, and have a lot of data about the prompt so you can throw in facts and figures to support you case. Most importantly, you need to be calm, relaxed and able to change direction quickly.
close
17 Nov 2016, 08:05
