Courtesy of MBA Dutchie
My interviewer was a recent Kellogg grad who worked in PE pre- and post-MBA. He was very open and friendly. He asked me to switch to English (we started off in Dutch, our native language), and asked me a variant of “Walk me through your resume”.
I gave him my 2-minute story on why I had chosen my undergraduate school, what was unique about the program, what I had learned, and how I made the move into my professional life. I think the common essay advice is just as valid here: don’t limit yourself to the ‘what’, but also mention the ‘why’.
As I talked about my first promotion at work, he interrupted me and asked me to elaborate on a specific detail. This was clearly an attempt to see how I would respond to a question that I could not have prepared for. For these kind of situational questions, you should train yourself to use frameworks. For leadership questions you can make sure to include 1) communicating a vision, 2) defining roles/responsibilities, 3) measuring/monitoring progress, 4) success. The question I got was how I had persuaded my management to do something. I told him what required improving, why it required improving (with quantifiable reasons), what my solution was, why that solution would work (quantifiable), how I explained this to my management, and how this left no doubt with them to agree with me. He seemed happy with my response.
He then told me we could easily switch back to Dutch, as my English was clearly up to snuff. I saw an opening to engage in dialogue and told him that, even though I had 99th percentile GMAT verbal and TOEFL scores, and had generally no trouble expressing myself, in hard-pressed business discussions or negotiations I sometimes saw this as a weakness, and whether he recognized it. We chatted a bit about it, and even though I was a bit nervous for having blurted out a weakness without him asking for one, I felt the ensuing dialogue was very valuable for ‘bonding’ with him, and was comforted by his comment that my English was good enough not to think of it as a ‘weakness’.
He then went on to ask “Why MBA”. I had prepared more for a “Why Kellogg” question, so I tried to spin my answer around what I was looking for in a business education, and why Kellogg was a great match. Because your long-term and short-term goals should be a major factor in “Why MBA” I suggested I touch on those a bit first, which he said was OK.
He subsequently never asked me again about “Why Kellogg”, even though I had not exhausted my reasons for going to Kellogg yet. Fortunately, I managed to slip those into later questions and into our discussions on what he liked so much about Kellogg. Finding the right balance between sounding sincere and sounding like a car salesman is tough. You should have good reasons for going to Kellogg or any other school for that matter, but you don’t want to be sucking up to the school either.
His next question was “What do you consider the weaker areas in your application”. I had prepared somewhat for this question, but not much. I told him I do not have spectacular extracurriculars, and, amazingly, he had had the same problem in his application. We exchanged views on the merits of extracurriculars and community service and how Europeans are often surprised to see the weight attached to this. I told him I saw this as a cultural difference between the US and Europe, and he agreed. He even offered me a new insight I had never come across — in the US, inequality is larger than in Europe, so ‘giving back’ is more important than it is in Europe. In all my research for good excuses, I had never seen this mentioned before, and I even think it is not an excuse — it is very true. (Although I wouldn’t recommend stating to any adcoms that community service in Europe is not important)
Next was teamwork, which was probably the most surprising part of the interview. He told me he was not going to ask me about teamwork, because he believed everyone can sell himself as a good teamplayer, so why would that give him any indication as to my abilities. He said he attached more value to seeing my interpersonal skills, and since we had been more engaged in dialogue than in a question-answer interrogation, he said he had a positive impression of how it would be to work together with me. I could have argued that this is why behavioral interviewing techniques had been invented, but I figured my teamwork points had already been scored, and I could only make things worse (even though I had a couple of anecdotes ready.)
In total, we talked for about an hour or maybe more, and it was very easy to make the interview conversational.
I can give the following advice. You know (roughly) which questions you will be asked. Prepare your answers in bullet-point format, and rehearse with a bathroom mirror or a friend, and, by all means, time and record your responses to see if you can answer all questions in 2-5 minutes without sounding boring, monotonous, or overly scripted. Try to engage your interviewer by acting as one professional talking to another professional. Make it interesting for them, and don’t come off as a drone who can only fire rehearsed answers at rehearsed questions.
Status: Admitted
