Tuesday 24 November 2015

London Business School Interview

LBS only required one interview. The adcom however sends specific instructions to interviewers on what areas to focus on and questions to ask. As such, I was prepared for an intense "grilling" from my interviewer - an alumni who was a partner at a PE firm who had a very different background to mine.

The interview went for 1.5 hours instead of the 2 hours or so I expected. He was very nice, but like what I found with most of the LBS people I interacted with, there is a certain air of formality and conservativeness. LBS people are also a bit harder to read it seems so I wasn't too sure how I did.

The interview started off with the usual walk through CV/why an MBA/why LBS and also some questions about the career choices I made. He then focused quite a bit on leadership and teamwork experiences. He also asked what my leadership development goals were. I was asked quite a few questions on what international business experience I had as he said that this didn't come through very clearly on my CV since my career consisted of working only in NZ. LBS definitely wanted him to ask about it. The hint I got was that I needed to rewrite my CV.

LBS interviews require an impromptu presentation on a topic chosen by your interviewer - 5 mins to think and 5 mins to present. I found the presentation part a bit of a challenge because there were two parts to it. It was a case about leading change management - managing restructuring and the fact that people were not happy about it. I was asked to present a) how I would approach this with my team and how much I would share my personal feelings b) Pick one of 3 questions and also talk about that - I picked one that said to describe how to overcome resistance to change. I didn't feel like I had a good conclusion to round off the presentation because the presentation was in 2 parts though I tried to relate them. Did I mention, on-the-spot presentations are really not my strong suit?

The third part of the interview was where I got to ask questions and he gave me a lot of advice on what I should do to prep and what electives I should take. Interestingly, he suggested that I major in finance given my long term goal, although I have zero knowledge of finance. It definitely gave me something to think about post-interview.

He also advised that to get the most out of LBS's career services, you needed to try and fit within the mould and that you would struggle if they couldn't put you in a box, which happened with him. Fortunately for me, since I want to move into consulting, I'm easy for career services to put into a box.

He also said that if I got admitted, to get in touch with him and he would provide me with prep resources for finance given my lack of finance knowledge, and resources for consulting since that was what I wanted to move into. I was definitely wowed by his helpful offer and left the interview with more pre-MBA tasks to add to my to-do list.

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