How To Prep For Your MBA Interview

So here we go. You got invited to interview by your target school, congratulations. The MBA interview is one of the most important parts of your application. I'm going to talk about the four core things that you need to do to prepare yourself for that moment from a content perspective today. But recognize that this is a vast oversimplification. I've written an entire book about this. If we've been watching any of my videos, you can see it right behind me there. It's called Interview Hero, and it's linked above in the description of this video. And it's three hundred and thirty pages. So there's really a lot to do. A lot more than four easy steps to prepare yourself for answering MBA interview questions and also to truly ace any interview that you have coming up that means something to you. But for the purposes of MBA Monday, since I've only got five minutes of your time, I'm going to share with you the top four things that I suggest you do to prepare for your MBA interview.

1. Number one, research the school's approach to interviews. Make sure you prep for interviews. Every school has a slightly different philosophy about what they're looking to get out of that conversation. For example, on one end of the spectrum, the MIT interview historically is entirely behavioral. It's a set of a few questions about very specific qualities that they want you to demonstrate and it's conducted by a professional interviewer. Take on the other end of the spectrum, a Kellogg student interview, which is a wide open conversation subject to the preferences of the student who's leading the conversation. And with only a few core questions that are always going to be the same across all of the student interviewers, you can see that these are going to be two very different conversations and two very different experiences. So, you want to know what you're getting into before you start preparing for this specific school’s interview, to start with research.
2. Number two is to review your application. This is sort of obvious. Read through your resume, read through your essays, remind yourself of what you said your goals were, what you said your key experiences were. The questions about what you put in your application may or may not come up in the interview depending on the school's philosophy, but you definitely want to make sure that any answers you give are consistent with what you said in your application. That's absolutely critical. So be sure to review your essays and remember what it was that you told the school you were all about and what you wanted to do.
3. Step number three is to go way beyond what you put in the application and refresh your memory about your key stories. One lesson I learned the hard way during my MBA recruiting interviews with consulting firms is that even though I had written my resume and I sort of thought, oh, I know my resume, I can talk about all the things in there because first of all, I was there and second of all, I wrote that resume. So, if anybody asks me any questions about my resume, I’m ready to answer them. The truth is, most of what happened en route to those achievements that showed up on your resume, happened a very long time ago. And the details are not top of mind. So to be able to tell vivid stories and to speak in a very concrete and compelling way about things that happened in the distant past, you're going to need to do some reminiscing.
4. And then finally, number four is to prepare for the mother of all MBA interview questions. It's actually three questions, but I think of it as one kind of juggernaut of questions. And that is:

• What are your goals?
• Why do you want an MBA?
• Why do you want to go to our school?

It's basically your personal statement. It's the discussion of where you're headed and why this program is the right fit for you. Almost every school is going to ask this question in some form. And for some schools, it's really the only question that matters in that interview. So, make sure that you're ready to just absolutely nail that question.