Applying to US Universities

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Most of the top business schools tend to conduct a phone interview for the short-listed candidates. The interview is not to test the applicant’s knowledge but a general discussion aimed to understand the candidate better and to determine if the applicant is really interested in that business school.

Some of the commonly asked questions in the interview:

Tell us something about yourself. Speak for about two minutes highlighting your key strengths. There is no need to tell your academics or GMAT score. They have it

What diversity do you bring to our program? If you are a Indian male techie, this is very crucial because they presume you do not bring any diversity to a applicant pool already filled with your type. Think about all your achievements and skills far from IT and Computers and make a strong case.

What are your long-term goals? Be yourself. Make sure you do not contradict your essays.

Why our program? Your answer should reflect that you have really read their webpage and understood the main strengths of that B-school. Also project as if this is your top choice and you are very excited about the possibility of studying there.

If you do not understand a question request the interviewer to repeat it. In the end thank the interviewer for her time. Now the most important piece of advice if you are an international applicant - most people have a tough time understanding the English accent of people from other countries specially on phone. So in a phone interview you need to speak clearly and very very slowly with lots of punctuations.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 3:08 am and is filed under MBA and GMAT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.