[面试经验] Wharton Interview Tips

从Wharton R2 开始发interview 通知以来，不少人问我该怎么准备interview。虽然这帖子可能有些晚了，希望还是能分享一些自己的看法，给下星期要做Hub的人一些帮助。以下以Q&A的方式来表达

Q: What does Wharton interview look like?
A: 1) It's a blind interview, which means the only thing interviewer has is your resume. 2) The interviewers tend to ask more detail about your background/experience to help the adcom cross check what you wrote on your essays is consistent with what you say. 3) For international students, the interviewers also need to make sure the candidate's English is good enough to study the courses and contribute to the class discussion.

Q: Should I choose hub interview or alumni interview?
A: It depends (cliché!). For hub, the interview will be conducted by people from adcom. It means you will be interviewed by well-trained interviewers. Good things are 1) the questions will be more "standard" and it is unlikely to see "unexpected" questions. 2) they could be more objective to examine your candidacy. However, on the other hand, it will be more difficult to "impress" the interviewer and you can be easily compared with other candidates on a relative performance basis.

For international students whose native language is not English, if you speak English well and have strong communication skill, maybe hub interview will help you stand out. On the other hand, if you know some alumnus with the same background/career path like you and he/she happens to be on your interviewer list, maybe you will find chemistry with that person.

Q: Is Wharton looking for certain types of candidate?
A: No. Wharton is looking for good candidates in every industry. As I always say, if you have unique background/experience, you are likely to have better chance to get in than typical consultants/bankers as a lot of them are applying and every school is trying to diversify its student pool. Wharton doesn't care how many other business schools you are applying and interviewer will not grill you on this. As long as the school thinks you are good and wants you, you will be admitted.

Q: What type of questions should I expect to be asked?
A: In general, interviewer will evaluate a candidate on the following areas. 1) Professional Development & Career Goals: what's your career path, progress, short-term and long-term goals? Why MBA? Why now? Why Wharton? 2) Soft Skills: communication skill, passion, energy, interpersonal skill, attitude, maturity, poise, etc. 3) Contributions: extracurricular activities, social services, hobbies, etc. In addition, you should expect some unconventional questions because the interviewer wants to see how you think and whether you can communicate effectively.

Q: Any special tips to crack the Wharton interview?
A: Unfortunately, no. Be well-prepared, be confident, be open-minded. Show your urgency, your passion and your commitment to have a MBA degree from Wharton at this stage of your life. Also, practice makes things perfect.

此篇同步发表在我的blog http://adamycheng.blogspot.com/

感谢分享啊。

热心校友，wharton名不虚传！

非常感谢~~`

Thanks for your input vickiyan. I beleive we are saying the same thing. What I meant was diversified student body is a goal for adcom when they look for candidates. As long as the candidate is good, adcom is unbiased. However, in an extreme case , if adcom happens to admit many bankers in the first round. In the second round, assuming there is only one spot left, the adcom will be very likely to admit a "good" candidate who is not a banker to diversify the student pool.

以下是引用jelt2359在2009-3-1 2:37:00的发言：
Q: Is Wharton looking for certain types of candidate?
A:
No. Wharton is looking for good candidates in every industry. As I
always say, if you have unique background/experience, you are likely to
have better chance to get in than typical consultants/bankers as a lot
of them are applying and every school is trying to diversify its
student pool.

I would like to elaborate this point a little bit more: 

I'm
not quite sure that Wharton is looking for candidate in every industry
intentionally, but I believe what Wharton is looking for are good
candidates. No bias on the background, and I don't think the diversity
is intentionally designed and picked out: good candidates happen to be
spreading out in every industry. What impressed people most are always
the personal qualities: achievements, solid skills (hard+soft) and
personality.

For your reference.

To elaborate even further, I'm not sure that there even exists a 'typical consultant/banker'. Everyone has had such a variety of experience, growing up in different places, attending different schools, and many have a lot of different jobs in addition to being a consultant/banker. Indeed, even within consulting/banking, there are so many ways to distinguish yourself, to seek out your own path, and etc. At the end of the day, what it really comes down to is who you are: which is why I'm always against someone using a 'profile' to determine whether he/she is suitable for a school. Indeed what is most important is not your profile, but the stories that you can tell about your life!

For your reference as well

Jason, it's great to see current student being active and help prospective students here on CD. Your background is impressive, too.

Let me elaborate more on what I meant about "typical consultant/banker." For consultant, if you join those big consulting firms right after college, it is a natural or sort of mandatory move to apply business school after 2 to 3 years of work because those big consulting firms need you to have a MBA degree to move up. Also for banker, even though you don’t need a MBA to be promoted from analyst to associate, many analysts tend to go to business school to 1) take a break 2) try something else after work 100+ hours per week for 3 years.

From my observation, 5-10 years ago, you can see many top b-school students with this type of “typical” background/experience”. 3 years in consulting/banking and then go to top b-school. However, I do see the percentage of this type of students is decreasing, especially for candidates with pure banking/consulting experience. Two main reasons

1. Average age or years of working experience to enter business school becomes higher. (You are an extreme case which is very rare. The average age for class of 07 is 28.6 and average year of working experience is 6 years.) Understand HBS and Stanford started to look for young talents these years but you can see the average year of working experience is still higher than say 5 or 10 years ago. Having said that, people with 3 year pure banking/consulting experience need to try hard to persuade adcom to admit them.

2. Bankers and consultants are too busy to work on GMAT and application. Imaging if a person works till mid-night everyday, has almost no weekend and travel every week, it will be tough for him/her to focus on application and we both know MBA application is not just filling the forms.  

However, from my perspective, consultants are at better position than bankers to apply business schools. Few reasons

1) The firm will prepare and sponsor them to go to business school. For Mckinsey, they have very comprehensive training and materials to help BAs to apply business school. Also their senior people all have MBAs and know the application process well.

2) Consultants tend to have more diversified working experience from and hours is not as crazy as bankers.

3) Many consulting firms have the policy “up or leave.” You need to have an MBA to move up.

4) Bankers were paid too well before. If you can earn +200K (USD) a year, spending 70K to go to business (a year) means your yearly opportunity cost is 270K.

I can’t agree more on there is no typical candidate/career path to promise you to get into top business school. The most important thing is you need to tell and persuade adcom why you need a MBA and why you.