University of Michigan Ross MBA Admissions Interviews

Interviews for the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business are not particularly hard. Based on my experience as well as the reports found at accepted.com and clearadmit.com, I can say that they are generally seem to be friendly, focused on fit, and require the applicant to discuss the basics. Please refer to my prior overall MBA admissions strategy interview posts( here, here, here, and here) for general advice on prepare for the Ross interview.

Ross interviews are conducted blind, but since what you say in the interview will be checked against what you wrote, make certain that your oral and written presentations are consistent, especially in terms of your goals.

My colleagues Steve Green and Jessica King have compiled the following common Ross interview questions based on publicly available reports:

INTRODUCTION AND “BASICS” (GOALS, REASONS FOR MBA)

• Tell me about yourself.  Walk me through your resume. What should I know about you? *Probe resume: Cross-reference, push for details about why and how.
• Why did you choose your undergraduate school/major, current employer etc.
• Tell me about your current position and responsibilities.
• What do you do outside of work?
• What are your career goals?
• Why do you want an MBA?
• Why Ross?
• Why now?
• How will you be involved inside/outside of the classroom?
• What will your biggest contribution be?
• What will you do if not accepted to Ross?

TEAMS

• How would you deal with a teammate who doesn’t act like a team player?
• Tell me how you dealt with a team member who was under-performing.
• Tell me about your role on a team.
• Tell me about a time when your team faced a lot of obstacles? What did you learn?
• Tell me about a time when you had to deal with a disagreement on a team.
• What would you do in a team consisting of members with strong personalities?
• Tell me about a time when you worked effectively in a team. What do you think made the team so effective?

LEADERSHIP

• Tell me about a time you showed initiative.
• How do you manage conflict?
• Please give me 3 examples of your leadership experience?
• What does leadership mean to you?
• Tell me about a time you had to deal with a struggling team member.

OTHER BEHAVIORAL QUESTIONS

• Tell me about a time when you had a professional failure and what you learned from it.
• Tell me about a time when you received negative feedback from a supervisor and how did you respond.
• Tell me about a disappointment you’ve experienced.
• Tell me about a time you had to think outside the box.

SELF-AWARENESS/PERSONAL

• Key learnings from the last 4 years of your work experience.
• Most significant accomplishment.
• What is your definition of success?
• What was the most useful constructive criticism you’ve received?
• What 3 adjectives would your friends use to describe you and why?
• What makes you unique?
• What was a challenging experience in your life?
• What do you do for fun?
• Tell me about any volunteer/charity work you’ve done.
• What is the last book you read?
• What is something about you that isn’t on your resume?
• What question do you wish I would have asked?

Ross interviewers are admissions officers, students, and alumni and interviews can be in person or by telephone.  For a discussion of the characteristics of admissions officer interviewers, student interviewers, and alumni interviewers, see here. Reported length for interviews is usually 30 minutes with some going 45 minutes and few lasting an hour (these seem to be an exception). Campus interviews will most likely be 30 minutes. Given that this is a short interview, I think it is particularly important that you have a very clear idea about what you want to cover. The most frustrating thing about such an interview could easily be lack of time to cover your own perceived key points, so make sure that when you think about the likely questions above, you have fully considered how you will use your answers as a vehicle to help your interviewer understand why you should be offered a place at Michigan. For more about strategy, see here.

If you are interviewed by a student, take it seriously! Apparently a sufficient number of applicants were not in R1 for 2010 admission because Soojin Kwon Koh, the Director of Admissions, posted the following:

I wanted to pass on a bit of advice to Round 2 (and 3) applicants based on some experiences during Round 1. It seems that some applicants view interviews with an MBA2 who is part of the Admissions Student Committee as less "serious" than an interview with an alumnus or staff member. Some applicants were a bit unprofessional, shall we say, probably thinking that an MBA2 is on the level of a peer/buddy rather than a bona fide admissions interviewer. Don't let that be you. 

Treat whoever you interview with equal seriousness. 

Click here to find out about my interview preparation services.

-Adam Markus

I am a graduate admissions consultant who works with clients worldwide. If you would like to arrange an initial consultation, please complete my intake form. Please don't email me any essays, other admissions consultant's intake forms, your life story, or any long email asking for a written profile assessment. The only profiles I assess are those with people who I offer initial consultations to. Please note that initial consultations are not offered when I have reached full capacity or when I determine that I am not a good fit with an applicant.

UC Berkeley Haas MBA Interviews

My post on Haas MBA admissions essays can be found here. 

Before reading this post on UC Berkeley Haas MBA's admissions interviews, I suggest reviewing the former Director of Admissions for the Full-time MBA Program's excellent Tips for Acing the Admissions Interview. I also suggest that you listen to the short podcast on interviewing found at http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/haas/podcast/audio/haas_mba_interview_tips1.mp3. The advice is very simple and clear and applicable to most schools. If you think you will get special insight about the Haas interviews from listening to this, you will likely be disappointed, but still it is worth a listen.  For my overall perspective on interview strategy, see here, here, and here, and here.

The interview reports found at clearadmit.com and accepted.com make it clear that you need to know your resume completely as you will be asked about content in it ("Walk me through your resume"). Review it carefully and consider what your interviewer might ask you to explain more thoroughly. If it is on your resume, it is fair game.

My colleagues Steve Green and Jessica King have compiled and organized the following list of common Haas MBA questions based on publicly available reports.

WHY MBA/HAAS

-Tell me about yourself / Take me through your resume (be prepared to explain why/how you changed jobs)

-Why an MBA?  

-Why part-time?

-Career goals?

-Why now?

-What will you contribute to Haas?

-Are there any clubs/activities that do not exist that you would like to start?

BEHAVIORAL QUESTIONS (For my advice on behavioral questions, see my post on MIT.)

Leadership

-A challenging leadership/teamwork experience.

-A time you led a group.

-A time when you were a humble leader.

Teamwork

-A time you failed/were on a team that failed.

-A time you displayed good teamwork.

-A time a team member was not pulling his/her own weight

Interpersonal skills

-A time when you met resistance/faced a conflict in a professional setting, either with a team or a person. How did you deal with it?

-A time you faced an interpersonal challenge.

-A time you received constructive feedback and how you responded.

Berkeley-esque questions

-A time you advocated for change/going in a different direction.

-A time you took a risk.

-A time you did something really innovative.

-A time you made an impact at the office.

-Something you wish you could have done differently.

GENERAL QUESTIONS

Professional

-How would you describe your management/leadership style?

-How do you define “leadership?” Give an example.

-How would your boss, co-workers, subordinates describe you? Friends? (give both strengths and weaknesses)

-3 strengths? 3 weaknesses?

Personal

-What book are you currently reading?

-Putting aside your professional life, tell me about your personal life and the activities that define you (he honed in on the "other interests" section of the resume right from the start)

-Tell me about your process for self-reflection. How do you define/measure success and then evaluate whether you've been successful in a particular situation?

-Tell me something about yourself that’s not on your resume.

-What do people like about you?

As you can see from the above, you need to be prepared to answer routine MBA questions, some of which might be asked in a behavioral style. It is important that you be prepared to show your fit to  Haas and be well prepared to answer the above Berkeley-esque questions. Remember BILD!

I see no reports and have not been told about any trick questions really. Be prepared to ask questions about the program. If you have an alum interview, be prepared to have a number of questions.

Interviewers (students, adcom, or alumni) are usually friendly and consistently try to create a very relaxed interview atmosphere. Most interviews are conducted with students on-campus or alumni off-campus. I did read some reports of relatively weak student interviewers, so don't be surprised if this should happen. Regardless of how your interviewer performs, just be relaxed and positive. This is an interview about fit and your own potential, so make sure you can explain in depth why you want to attend Haas, how you will contribute to it, and what you intend to do afterwords. Previous contact with alum, visits to campus, and/or intensive school research are all great ways to prepare.

Campus interviews are scheduled for 30 minutes and usually last 30-45 minutes. Alum interviews seems to last about 45 minutes to an hour.

Click here to find out about my interview preparation services.


-Adam Markus

I am a graduate admissions consultant who works with clients worldwide. If you would like to arrange an initial consultation, please complete my intake form. Please don't email me any essays, other admissions consultant's intake forms, your life story, or any long email asking for a written profile assessment. The only profiles I assess are those with people who I offer initial consultations to. Please note that initial consultations are not offered when I have reached full capacity or when I determine that I am not a good fit with an applicant.

Know Your Audience: Three Things You Should Know About Admissions Committee Members

I am pleased to introduce a new guest blogger to my site, Jessica King. Jessica and I have been working together since 2002. She brings a unique perspective to her work as an admissions consultant because she holds a degree in higher education administration from Harvard, is a professional interviewer, and has previously been a professional voice actress. Over the past year, she has assisted my clients with interview practice who were admitted to HBS, Kellogg, Stanford, Tuck, and Wharton for fall 2011. Her comprehensive service clients will be attending Columbia, Kellogg and Wharton, among others. Below, she provides a great perspective on a subject that she has true expertise in. For more about Jessica’s services, please visit http://www.king-consulting.org.

-Adam Markus

Know Your Audience: Three Things You Should Know About Admissions Committee Members

by Jessica King

Over the past nine years, I’ve had the opportunity to consider the application process from a variety of perspectives through my experience as an application consultant and work as a recruiter in the higher education sector. Additionally, during my graduate work at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I spent an intensive year studying the field of higher education with professionals from top institutions around the country and I was delighted that a large number of my classmates had come to the program with backgrounds in admissions. During this time, I had the opportunity to participate in a seminar class that was focused on admissions policies and principles at selective colleges and universities. The discussions and debates that were such a vital part of this seminar, as well as those in my other classes, offered me invaluable insights into the world of admissions.  

In any form of persuasive communication, the most important factor in successfully communicating your ideas and eventually winning over your audience is presenting content in a way that is both compelling and easy to understand. In order to do this, there is one piece of advice that is likely familiar to you: know your audience. In the MBA application process, your audience is, naturally, the admissions committee (adcom).

Obviously, every member of the adcom is different, but in this post I’d like to introduce three things I’ve come to learn about adcoms in general that every MBA applicant should keep in mind when preparing his or her application.

1. It is highly unlikely they are experts in your field or specialization.

While there are a number of adcom members around the world that entered the field of admissions after having spent time in business and/or receiving an MBA, the likelihood of their having the detailed knowledge that you do in finance/supply chain management/software engineering/pharmaceutical sales is slim-to-none. This is extremely important to take into consideration when writing your essays. It is your job to present your experiences and goals in a way that is detailed and compelling, yet easily understandable for someone who does not know your field well.

2. It is entirely possible they have no business experience whatsoever.

Many adcom members are career academic administrators, some of whom are so committed to the field that they have received advanced degrees in higher education administration (like many of my classmates!). I can think of a number of adcom members at top programs who have spent their entire careers in academic administration and for whom their only knowledge of business comes from personal study or auditing MBA courses at their institution. This is important to take into consideration because their perspective of business and even the function of an MBA may be markedly different from yours (more on this in a future post). You cannot assume that the adcom shares the same assumptions and attitudes about business that you do.

You not should try to second-guess them – instead, just be sure that you explain yourself as thoroughly as possible in your essays. It’s possible that the first reader of your application will be a first-year adcom member who’s never worked outside his/her institution. A great question to keep in the back of your mind when drafting your essays is, “Would someone with no business experience be able to easily understand the point I am trying to make?”  

2. They are trained to consider your application in a holistic manner.

Something that is often difficult for many applicants to understand – particularly those accustomed to a quantitative, test-based approach to admissions – is that the adcom’s most important concern is generally not your academic ability. Of course, the adcom wants to know whether or not you will be able to successfully complete the academic component of the MBA program; however, they have been trained to evaluate this aspect of your application very quickly and this becomes a kind of “gateway” criteria.

Once they are satisfied with your academic ability, they move on to other considerations and these are often evaluated in a very qualitative, often imprecise manner. They will evaluate qualities such as leadership, teamwork, motivation, tenacity, and potential for future success … all of which are impossible to quantify in any sort of accurate way. The different pieces of your application – the application form, resume, essay questions, recommendations and interview – offer them “pieces of the puzzle,” so to speak. As an applicant, you must first know what holistic image you want to convey to the admissions committee, then provide them with the pieces necessary for them to see that image.

This is why it is so incredibly important for you to take the time at the beginning of the applications process (now!) to determine exactly what kind of picture you want the adcom to form of you while reading your application. By first determining your selling points, you can then maximize your usage of the different parts of the application to present yourself to the adcom in the best possible way.

I welcome questions/comments about this post. Please feel free to email me at jessica AT king-consulting DOT org. To learn more about my application consulting services, please visit http://www.king-consulting.org.