She met me sharp on time and we went to her office. Unlike Wharton where the interview is held in a small dingy room, her office was large and spacious.
We chatted for 1-2 minutes about a class that I had attended a day before and then she laid out the procedure – the interview would last for exactly 30 minutes and I wouldn’t get a chance to ask questions unless there was something really really important. She said most people ask questions just for the sake of asking questions and she didn’t want to waste valuable time on that. Next she told me that she had read my application and if possible I should use new examples/ anecdotes in my answers. If I want to elaborate on an example given in the essays, I could do so too.
Questions
- Tell me more about your experience at your company?
- What have you learned there?
- What has been the most challenging task?
- How often do you use your analytical skills at work?
- Tell me about the company you co-founded? How did you decide to go in to that field
- What would be your role in that company going forward
- Elaborate more on your long term goals
- What do you think would be most challenging in achieving that goal
- What could cause you to change that goal. At this point she told me that our time was up.
- Any thing else that you want to convey that hasn’t been covered in the interview.
Given that the time was up – I passed on the offer. I simply said between the application and the interview I had covered all the important facets of my application and I didn’t want to waste her time by simply reiterating/ repeating what I had already said before
At the end she thanked me for taking out the time from my busy schedule to visit Harvard. She told me that she would prepare a writeup and send it back to the board and I would hear from them on 29th march.
Overall the interview was pretty standard. It felt more like an unstructured conversation. No huge surprises, except 3.2 above, I hadn’t thought about it before so I was a little hesitant in answering it.
