I had a on campus interview on February 23rd, 2008, with a recent graduate from Chicago (Class of 2006). It was a pretty standard conversational interview. The interview began with a little chit chat about the weather and my flight to Chicago. She noticed that I traveled from Colombia (South America) to visit GSB and asked me about my flight and if I had been to Chicago before. The interviewer then told me that she had glanced at my resume, proceeded to complement me on the depth of my work experience and subtly prompted me to dive right into my resume.
Questions:
- Walk me through my resume? (with 2-3 follow questions)
- What do you hope to accomplish with an MBA from Chicago? (a variation of the career goals question)
- How would you relate to team members who have less experience than you and yet try to dominate the team? (variation of the how you deal with a difficult team member)
- Describe your leadership style. (with a one or two follow-up questions)
- Give me an example of a learning experience, a professional one or academic, that you really enjoyed?
- What’s a good book you’ve read recently?
- A question about one of the community related extra curricular activity I had mentioned on my resume.
- Do you have any questions? I had couple.
Most of the questions I was asked were your typical/standard questions, some had a little twist or variation. My interviewer seemed genuinely interested in learning about me and my ability to lead. She also found it very interesting when I told her that I follow a rather tailored leadership style based on who I’m working with and the working environment. She liked how I took a varied leadership approach and agreed with me that a one-size-fits all leadership style may not work in a study team setting since you’ll have to work with varying personalities. I also noticed through her facial expressions (nods or smiles) that she really liked when I used concrete examples and even tied some of my experiences directly to a particular skill or strength and how that quality would enhance the classroom setting or team setting at Chicago. I had a few questions for her, some about the curriculum and career services. She did like the question about the positives of not having a strict cohort system. It seemed like she was a fan of the fact that Chicago students are not tied to having most of their first year classes with a cohort.
Overall the interview was pretty laid back. At first the interviewer appeared to be a rather serious individual and the interview had a very professional tone at the beginning. But after I showed some enthusiasm in my responses and shared some interesting anecdotes, she did seem much to open up more and became more personal.
