HBS/MBA Admission Interview Questions

March 16, 2008

Sample Harvard/MBA Interview questions – the list of questions below are not exhaustive but represent some of the questions you may be asked during MBA admission interviews.  The questions were prepared for me by an HBS graduate during my application and you may find them useful.  These questions are aimed at helping you succeed in your admissions interviews….. so read them carefully and pay attention to the key points.

(1) What are some questions they tend to ask? What do they focus on?

Your weak points/unclear/vague parts on application (”something they have a problem with”)

• Why do you want to do an MBA?
• Why now?
• Given your successful career, what will an MBA add to it?
• Why Harvard?
• What will you do after school?
• What motivates you?
• What will you do if you don’t make it to HBS?
• Long-term career goal?
• Why you as opposed to any other candidate?
• If you were CEO of your company…what would you do to make your company more competitive?
• How committed are you to getting an MBA?

(2) The questions can be very specific to the nature of your job too!!
The interview included some general questions (e.g., Name a company you admire and why?…What would you do to accomplish your goals if there were no MBA programs?), as well as several questions that are specific to your application (e.g., One of your recommendations mentioned …….can you expand on that?).
 
(3) How should you prepare for the interview?

Basically you should re-read your application carefully. Also they may pick on some unusual aspects of your application. So you friend should look through your application and see if anything sticks out e.g. If you have done a lot of charity work and they wanted to know what had motivated you in that direction and why… Also for each essay you wrote try and come up with a different situation for each.

(4) Resources:

To prepare, I recommend that you re-read your application and look for things that might be holes in the story / potential questions. Get a party to read it too and do the same thing.

There is a terrific book with a very good section on interviewing. The book is entitled “How to Get Into the Top MBA Programs” (by Richard Montauk). Amazon has it. Reading the chapter on interviewing was excellent preparation for me.

(5) How long is the interview?

The interview should last somewhere between 20-60 minutes. The interviewee needs to be dressed in business attire and it is better to be 5 or 10 minutes early than late (treat it as a professional employment interview). You might be comforted to know that probably 2/3 of all interviewees are eventually admitted. They say it is about 50-60%, but I think that’s just them being conservative.

(6) Other comments:

There are 2 philosophies that I have heard regarding interviews. One is that they want to make sure that you don’t have 2 heads or that you come across great on paper but can’t communicate. The other is that they have questions regarding your application and want you to explain them. I am more inclined to believe the first given the atmosphere/class environment at HBS vis-à-vis class participation (I also think it helps you relax more if you believe the first). During my interview, my interviewer kept pushing back on me to explain why I wanted to go back to school if I was enjoying I-banking and performing well at JP Morgan. She also asked me to explain more about what I planned to do post-MBA. That was pretty much it. Tell your friend to ask questions also. I interjected with mine along the interview, as she told me to, but this point depends very much on the interviewer.

(7) The format is different for on-campus interviews and for alumni interviews.

On campus:
The interviewer has read all the application in advance. My interviewer had all the details in mind. She had prepared a list of about 10 questions, very personalized. The questions asked are typically the toughest ones;

• Why did you have x employers before applying: tell me in detail about all
• Your career changes
• Why do you consider that it is the best time for you to do the MBA
• Duration: about 45 minutes
• Preparation: be ready to defend all the details of your application, as well as the points not included, but which might make the interviewer curious. Be consistent, honest, and enthusiastic.
   

(8) General Comments:

However, I do know a friend of my brother’s who got dinged after the interview round. He says the mistake he made was that he may have come across as being *too modest* early on in the interview and lost the interviewer after about 5 minutes. So I guess the key is to appear confident during the first few minutes and then ease into a casual conversation, if that is what the interviewer wants…

The interview is a half hour long – trust me it’s long – it feels like an eternity. For me it seemed as though there was something they wanted to ask me specifically about my application. Once that one question was answered the interviewer didn’t have much else to ask me. The woman interviewing me was very business like. She told me up front not to ask her any questions at the end of the interview unless I really and truly had something that I’d like to know. That is, don’t ask a B.S. question just because you think it is the right thing to do.

She asked me why HBS? Asked me to describe some analytical things that I did at work. Then asked me why HBS again. That was pretty much it. They told me I would hear in two weeks from the date of the interview – I heard after only one week that I was accepted.

My take on it is they tend to focus on something that caused them to put the person into the “interview” pile. To clarify, I believe they think the person ought to be in the “accept” pile but something is causing them to have a concern or need for clarification. I have not compared notes with anyone else, but for example in my case, I did not use a recommender from my last job. An additional insight is, again at least in my case, they tend to hone in on “that one thing” and ask repeated questions about it. Thus, my advice to your respective friends is know yourself (obvious in any interview) BUT ALSO try to think what they may be hung up on…and be prepared for that cold!

In a nutshell, it was confrontational (which was a similar experience to many others who have had interviews). It is designed to see how you will react given the case method environment – can you think on your feet? How do you react when directly challenged?