No one has updated this since last year, so I might as well. I received an invite to interview at Cornell with very little notice. It felt it was particularly disorganized compared to the way some other schools had done it, but on the other hand, I sort of appreciate the non-spoon fed approach. Regardless, I figured out how to take a 6:30am bus to Ithaca from NYC (take the Cornell bus, its very nice and clean and has wi-fi that works), and arrived a few hours before my interview. Although it was not the most convenient thing for me to do, I am glad I showed the extra effort and did not ask to be interviewed in the city. I highly recommend doing so if you can. I lucked out at the end of the day because I happened to arrive right as First Years were getting of their last exam. I basically had the entire class in the gorgeous foyer at my disposal. After checking with Ad Com and receiving a campus map, I took at deep breath and walked up to people and asked them to tell me about Johnson. Everyone was incredibly friendly, if not a little exhausted from the accounting exam they had all just taken. Students were eager to introduce me to people who were interested in my desired career path, just calling out across the space and waving them over. It felt very, very intimate there – reminded me a lot of the way my small, private high school operated in that people seemed like they knew each other rather well and had no problems being very comfortable in the space. I had about an hour-long conversation with about 10 or 15 students and felt like I had a good sense of the types of people that Johnson is looking for. I also received a lot of great interview tips, and the students seemed to be very understanding of how nervous I might have been.
Anyway, eventually my interview time came, and the incredibly nice woman in the office led me upstairs to my interviewer. Even she knew what I was interested in, and mentioned that my interviewer had lots of expertise as a Career Manager in my desired field. The interview was rather formal – she asked me to walk through my resume, my undergraduate activities, what my GMAT score was, where else I was applying and why, what companies I was interested in. She wrote down lots of notes, but also nodded and smiled emphatically. It is a lot to squeeze your whole life and hopes and dreams into an hour, so be sure you practice and have a pretty good road map for how to get to all your points, even if it doesn’t flow exactly the way you wanted. In comparison to Darden, for instance, this was a much more standard interview, so be ready with responses to directed questions. Each person I talked to during my time on campus expressed how important it was that you want to be at Cornell and feel the “fit” because it is small program. We’ll see how they felt about me in a week’s time!!
