Re: The London Business School 2011 Thread
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18 Nov 2010, 00:57
As promised, here my "LBS interview debrief".
The interviewer was an Alumnus that works in an European Investment Bank.
The interview was at 6 PM. He welcomed me, offered me a glass of water and we went to a meeting room. He had printed my entire application. He was cordial but serious.
Once there, he explained me the interview structure: he would make me questions, then the 5 minutes impromptu presentation and finally he would talk about his career and answer to my questions. About the presentation, he said that he had chosen one topic among six proposed by the AdCom, that it was fine for him if I spoke less than 5 minutes, and that the goal was to see how I think and how I make presentations.
So he started asking me questions taking some notes as I spoke. Here some I remember and in this order:
- Explain me who you are
- Tell me when you have a conflict leading people (I was surprised with a hard question so early)
- Tell me when you led people and you resolved a conflict with someone else in your team
- Tell me what you learned in those situations
- What strengths and weaknesses the people you led would tell me about you?
- Why an MBA and why now
- Career goals
- Why your current career won't help you to achieve your goals and you prefer to do an MBA?
- I see you have applied to other schools, why would you choose LBS over them? Why did you apply to X? and Y? and Z?
- What do you like from LBS?
- How would you be involved in the LBS community?
- Tell me when you had a cultural shock problem and how did you solve it
- Why are you interested in X? (something specific about the school that I've put in my essays)
- What is happening in the world regarding the financial crisis?
- What are the problems Spain has? (I’m from Spain)
- What would you change in Spain regarding those problems?
Then he gave me a piece of paper, a pen and the topic of the presentation. He gave me about 3-5 minutes to prepare.It remembered me a lot to a TOEFL Speaking question. The difference was that the topic was harder but I had much more time to prepare. I think I spoke about 5 minutes but I'm not sure, maybe it was less.
The last 30 minutes were very interesting as he spoke a lot about his career, the MBA program, why I should do it, about things he liked, things he didn't, about the city of London, where to live, what clubs he liked, about the study groups, first and second year projects, internship, etc. I made him a lot of questions as we talked. It was a very interesting conversation and I think he was honest in all his opinions.
The whole think lasted about 1h20 minutes.
I hope this helps.