Johnson: Interview Transcripts & Notes
Skype interview- with Admissions staff
Tell me about your experience including undergrad (i.e. walk me through your resume)
What are your areas of weakness that you hope an MBA will help you with
Tell me about a challenge you dealt with during work experience
What type of leadership qualities do you seek to embody
What is your post-MBA career goal
What is your plan B if your post-MBA career goal were to not work out
Why Johnson
What specific impacts would you like to make at Johnson
Knowing the other schools you applied to (which I had to list in the application and she repeated to me), what decision criteria are you considering / prioritizing to choose a specific program
Any questions for Admissions
Interview on campus
I was interviewed by a second year MBA student who assists with the admissions process - a senior AdCom member sat beside him observing and taking notes.
1. Tell me about yourself
2. Asked about my goals
3. Probed me on my goals and if I had done research on these types of roles and what they entail
4. Why Johnson?
5. How will Johnson help with my goals? What electives was I interested in?
6. What do you want from an MBA aside from the skills/academics/professional help?
7. Name two weaknesses
8. Asked about my study abroad experience and if that helped me professionally
9. Who have you spoken to in the community and what did I learn from them?
10. Is there anything else you'd like to tell the adcom?
11. I then asked 3-4 questions
1.Why the MBA is important to you?
2.Why Cornell?
3.How will you contribute to Cornell?
4.Why did you choose to work in Engineering after graduation, why did you switch to Finance?
5.How did you feel about your work at OCBC. Why you joined VP Bank?
6.How did you develop relationships with other banks in Vietnam?
7.Why did you take a year-out. What have you been doing since then ?
8.Tell me about a time when you made a difficult decision?
9.Your leadership style? 2 of your leadership strengths, 2 of your weaknesses
10.A time you made mistake and how you overcame
Cornell Tech Interview
I was not asked a lot of questions in the interview. In fact, the questions were fairly basic and but for a couple of questions, none of them were from the 'standard set' of questions.
1) I was asked to tell the interviewer (Bianca M. Matthew from the recruitment team) something about myself. While taking them through my resume, I was stopped when I was explaining the achievements in each role (luckily I was able to take them through most of my roles). The reason given by Bianca to stop the interview was that "what I have done will be covered through the resume/questions that will be asked in the interview". Overall, my answer lasted about 1.5 minutes.
2) "If your friend reached out to you for advise on or help with opening a doughnut shop, how would you help?" My answer was that I would first ask my friend why they wanted to do it - if they were doing it just because everyone else was doing it and did not have a strong motivation to sell doughnuts, I would advise them against opening the doughnut shop. However, if they still wanted to go ahead with their plan or had a strong motivation to open the shop, I would ask my friend "how can I help?". I would be willing to help them with whatever they need, e.g., recipes for doughnuts, setting up the shop, etc. I would also come in with my own set of inputs on how to increase the sales, like signing up for a popular food delivery application.
3) "Describe a situation where you faced a resource shortage and how you tackled it". My answer was that it "was an accurate summary of my role at XX". My answer: Since we're doing projects for the biggest banks in XX, government enterprises and of course the XX project in XX, we're growing at a fast pace and we do not have the staff members to keep up with the development requirements of our clients. In such a situation, I went to the freelance platform XX and used my recruitment experience from XX to hire more developers for the team. I mentioned that I quickly onboarded these freelancers to the project, introduced them to the team and started with the development to meet the deadlines committed to our clients.
4) "What would you consider to be an advantage or disadvantage of a multidisciplinary business school over a standard business school?" In my answer, I explained that during the MBA, I would of course want to do things outside the core curriculum as well, and being in a multidisciplinary business school gives me access to students from diverse backgrounds. For example, if I want to build a new app, I would likely find someone who has worked on a similar project in a multidisciplinary school, which may not be the case in a standard business school.
5)"Is there something not mentioned on your resume that would help you contribute to the class? If yes, how?". Since I did not get a chance to walk the recruiter through my resume and completely missed the opportunity to tell them about my tennis career, I used this answer to explain that I the years of experience in XX helps me focus more on the task and hand and has given me the attitude to take on new challenges without fear. This will help me motivate my team in challenging tasks, where I would be able to help them focus and "keep their fingers crossed" for a good final result.
With Adcomm member, Very conversational
Tell me about your class visit and experience on-campus so far
Link together the different parts of your resume for me (including goals)
Why MBA?
What other schools are you applying to?
What makes you nervous about business school?
How do you deal with failure? Give an example.
Describe a difficult team-based situation
What is your greatest achievement?
How will you contribute to Cornell?
Where would you like to work after MBA?
What do you do in your free time?
My interview lasted about 45 minutes. It was conducted by a second year student, who was in the training interview process, and an admission committee member. The admission person sat quietly while the student asked most of the questions.
1)Why an MBA now? From here on the questions were about my resume:
2)You have experience in many different industries. Why did you choose to work in high-tech?
3)Do you want to return to California after your MBA?
4) Since the average work experience at Cornell is 5 years, and you have 3 years, how do you think you can contribute to the program? How do you demonstrate that you are ready to get your MBA now?
5)Tell me more about your current profession.
6) Provide a leadership example.
7)What are your strengths?
8)What is a weakness that has been described on your performance review at work?
9) How did you lead a team of 30 engineers?
10) How do you communicate with engineers when you do not have an engineering degree or background yourself? Was it ever difficult?
11) Has there ever been a time that you and a top-level engineer did not agree on something? How did you resolve that issue?
12)What community service activities do you do and why?
13)How has your work experience prepared you for your industry change?
- Interview with Indian Alumni who had done an A-MBA in Cornell in 20XX. My background - Indian male, family business, 15 years of education (yes, Johnson and a few other schools have started taking in students with less than 16 years of education. But its always better to EMAIL them and ask them specifically, explaining your background and experience
here goes - He first gave a bit of his background and said its more of a conversation than an interview ( I thought yea right!) He also said its a blind interview. The questions I was asked were (he was taking notes throughout) why mba (really in-depth questioning) why now why cornell - I had to be VERY specific as he kept on asking and probing about every point. what are your goals - short and long Give me an example of a situation where you had to push yourself beyond your skill-set Here, he said that if I have not had an experience, its ok and I dont need to 'manufacture' one Give me an example of a situation where one of your team members were'nt performing and you had a major project to handle (P.S. as a surprise, I was asked specifically to frame these in a Situation-Action-Result format!!!!) What is, in your opinion, your biggest weakness in the application I asked him whether he meant the application or me as a person. He replied both. I then gave a few weaknesses He mentioned that it was heartening to know I acknowledge them and that many applicants say that 'oh I dont have any weakness** Also, I think that when you research the school in and out, you can surprise even your interviewer! For example, when I was asked how would I contribute to the Community at Johnson, I mentioned 3-4 clubs. I even mentioned a 'laugh' club. He wasnt even Aware there WAS such a club. I told him look it up on the website, there indeed IS one club like that. I remember him saying "Wow. Even I am learning something now"" and making a note of it. In this situation, had I not researched well, I would have gotten rattled thinking "oh my God he doesnt know about it so it must be untrue", and would have gotten nervous. I knew it was on the website so I was pretty confident. These moments really test your confidence in an interview in my opinion!
I must say the way in which simple questions can be asked is simply overwhelming. After the situational questions, he asked me, "So I have come to know about your background. Now lets move in the future a bit. Imagine I am your class-mate in Johnson. We are about to make a team. Tell me why would I choose to be a member of your group?" He then closed his file and asked me if I had any questions for him. This discussion went on for about 30 mins and we had numerous points where I was finishing the statements he was mentioning about cornell, meaning I had researched well! The whole "conversation" lasted for 90 minutes. SIDE NOTE --- As for the detailed efforts needed for each school, a friend who's in LBS had done an exchange in Kellogg. He had said that even for a soft-skill subject such as Negotiation, Kellogg had used bar charts and graphs! That shows that they use of a Lot of quantitative ideas as a part of their pedagogy. He admitted that a lot of probing needs to be done in the Why XXX School. I really think it was a good decision to have researched Cornell for almost 7 straight days, 6-7 hour daily. For example, even though I did not say anything about the Hotel School, I had researched a lot about it. Voila! he mentioned for a brief moment that Cornell's hotel school conducts Happy Hours on Thursday. In this manner, I was able to converse with the interviewer very comfortably about the hotel school. I guess US schools tend to ask the questions in a convulated and situation-based manner rather than the straight-forward manner of UK schools. I must mention that it really helps to go through forums such as pagalguy.com. I was reading the post about Johnson:Cornell applicants/admits. Half-way through the post I bumped into an applicant who had had an interview with the SAME guy I was going to interview with. I immediately contacted the applicant and got the inside scoop on the guy, his personality, the questions he asked, etc. For example, I came to know that the Alumni Interviewer was a fun guy who didn't mind a joke, so I took the liberty to lighten the conversation a bit.
Some advice. They ALWAYS ask AND note down your response to the question - Which other schools are you applying to and what are the similarities between them and Johnson. Johnson is a close knit community and they Really want to know whether you will are and wil be as helpful and open as the the people who have been there. Secondly, theres no such thing called a conversation. Its an interview. Be on your toes. Period. Thirdly, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, research research research. Apart from helping to make a better decision about the school, the confidence boost that you get when you know a lot of things about the school, is a BIG asset while interviewing. So talk to AT LEAST 2-3 alumni/current students, and ask them about their experience in the school AND what questions they were asked in the interview. Take their suggestions about special qs such as weakness, strength, and behavioral questions.
Here is everything which was asked in the interview. There were also questions related to details whenever I was answering a question. She stopped me several times and asked for further explanations and details.
Introductions were very brief; interviewer did not provide any past info about herself.
She had my resume and it also seemed to me that she read my essays.
The first question was: Why an MBA and why now?
The second question was: Why specifically Cornell, and which other schools are you applying to? Why these schools?
The rest of the questions were highly specific to my resume. She pointed parts from my resume and asked the questions:
Talk about your company, how did you start and add value to it?
Talk about the details about how you saved money to the company you worked for?
And there was the last question: What do you enjoy doing in your personal time?