Invited to Interview with Columbia!

After months of silence, it’s almost unreal to get two pieces of good news in as many (business) days, but that is exactly what has happened. Yes, this afternoon I opened up my email and found an invitation for an interview with Columbia!!

This is especially exciting because it makes my trip seem really worthwhile. I’m leaving tomorrow for San Francisco, then to Ann Arbor on Jan 22 and to New York on Jan 29. In between I’m visiting friends on the weekends.

In San Francisco I will be too early for the regular class visits, but I do have a coffee booked with a current student who I met through this blog, and I will also try to meet the director of the nonprofit management program.

At Ross, I will attend some prospective student activites and also the Black Business Students Association conference. I’m not black, but it still looks like an interesting conference with good speakers and a good way to get a sense of the school and its students.

For New York I haven’t got things arranged just yet, but the general plan will be about the same.

Anyway, there is lots to do before I leave, but I will try to post along the way! Wish me luck!!

 

Ross interview debrief

Well, I just got off the phone from my interview, and it was… mixed.

My interviewer was nice but quite formal. He was a second year student. He started out by asking me to describe my profile, or how he should remember me. I think I handled that one okay, but many of the other questions I felt like I rambled a bit.

Other questions included asking about my entrepreneurial experiences, why Ross, what does action based learning mean to me, why I was changing careers (and then two follow up questions on that, which really made me think that I didn’t explain it well at all), three weaknesses, and a behavioural question about a challenge I faced in a team environment, how I handled it and what I learned from it. This isn’t the right order, but you get the idea.

I think the part that went best was when I asked questions. I came up with some good ones that really caused him to go into some detail about his experience at Ross and that was what I wanted.

One thing that threw me off was that he started the interview by complimenting me on my profile. It got me confused about whether he’d seen the whole application (he hadn’t – I asked him later) and just really surprised.

Also, I’m sick today, so I think that my rambling can be at least partly attributed to that. (Even my writing is kind of rambling and disorganized!) Hopefully I didn’t mess up my chances, but I didn’t want to cancel the call.

 

Back to reality

It’s always a bit sad coming home from vacation, isn’t it? I was away for just about two weeks so I can’t complain that I didn’t get a good break, but a part of me is still wishing it didn’t have to end. On the plane ride home I had the strange coincidence of being seated next to someone who is pursuing a remarkably similar career direction to me. He is currently studying in Finland, in a program that they don’t call an MBA but is clearly the same thing, and his concentration is on corporate governance, which is an area that I am very interested in, albeit on the nonprofit side. I gave him my email address and told him to let me know where he ends up working. This world is so small that I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to run into him again in the future!

Anyway, I’m back now, and I was certainly happy to sleep in my own bed last night. I sent off the acceptance and resume for the Michigan interview invite when I got in last night and this morning a response was waiting for me. The bad news is that their requests for alumni interviewers are up 300% and so I have to interview with the admissions committee. Since I have to interview by November 21 and I don’t live anywhere near Michigan this means I will have to interview by phone. I think that this is a disadvantage, for me at least. It’s so much easier to have a nice chat with a person you have never met when you can see their face at the same time.

I’m not quite sure when to book it because I am going to be somewhat jetlagged this week. I’m thinking of making it Monday, which will give me time to recover and prepare. Of course, I’d really rather get it over with sooner so that I have less time to worry about it, but I think that it’s smarter to make sure I am awake for it.

Before I left I was too busy to post much, between the final push on my applications, getting ready for my trip, and clearing the decks at work, so here’s a quick recap. I submitted Columbia and Haas on Oct 28 just a few hours before I left. I ran into a small snag with Ross in getting my transcripts scanned, and I had to get my dad to prepare and upload the file for me. He put the transcripts on up October 30 (but I wasn’t able to check them) I did the submission from an internet cafe on October 31. I was a bit worried about that one, so the interview invitation came as a relief.

Despite weeks of planning, the last minute is always the last minute for me. I didn’t get the Haas “why MBA” essay up to 1000 words like I had planned. After struggling mightily to edit it down to 500 words for Michigan, it suddenly didn’t feel like I had that much more to say. Out of the 14 essays I submitted I would estimate that about 5 were great, and the rest were various shades of acceptable. By the end, I was so essayed out that doing final readings was probably a complete waste of time.

I have returned to the usual backlog of work, so I plan to let the MBA quest remain dormant for the next couple weeks, except of course for the Ross interview. After I’m feeling more caught up, I will need to address the question of R2. Hopefully I get a R1 acceptance early enough to save me and my reviewers this extra work, but they don’t guarantee this so I will have to be ready.

I would like to thank everybody who has sent me interview congratulations. It’s so nice to have a community to share this journey with!

 

Interview invite from Ross!

I’m still away on vacation so I’ll post a better update when I get back home, but I logged in to my email today to find an invitation to interview with Ross. Just wanted to share the good news!

 

Growing and Shrinking

Today was a much better day than yesterday.

My interview with Georgetown was this afternoon and it went very smoothly. There were no tricky questions, I was well-prepared, and she seemed to really like me. In fact, I was doing some research on the net before leaving this morning and I found a mock interview on the business week site that had the exact same interviewer and questions, so I felt very comfortable with the entire interview. I even had some relevant questions ready for her.

In the evening I went to the Forte Foundation event. It was way better than the one on Sunday. There were better schools, a better panel and little extras that made it feel like they wanted us there such as a gift from Fidelity (the hosting location was their offices) and really good food (that I didn’t really touch except for a cookie that I should have left alone since I was already full). There was no food at the event yesterday, and it was a full day event. Not even something cheap like donuts!

I got there quite early since I was on foot and public transit, so I got to start talking to the schools a few minutes early… before the din became unbearable and the aisles too crowded to move. If I had one complaint it would be that the room was too small for the number of schools and people. At the beginning it looked great, but once the people arrived it was crowded and hot!

I had a number of good conversations with admissions officers and students at a few schools that I am interested in. Sadly, they all really want to encourage applications so none of them are willing to come out and suggest that their school may not be a good fit. Of course, they are not willing to indicate any concrete interest in my application either, so I get lots of general encouragement but little specific encouragement. It’s very frustrating.

One surprise this evening was the emergence (briefly) of MIT Sloan as a potential contender. I stopped at a couple of GMAT/Admissions consulting tables and had Sloan suggested both times so I stopped by the table and talked to an admissions officer. She sounded enthusiastic that they could support my non-profit aspirations, but when I examined the website after getting home this evening there is really no evidence of related courses or philosophy. I was planning to stop by the school tomorrow, but now I’m thinking that I won’t bother. My list keeps growing, I need to work on shrinking it, and I think that Sloan isn’t a good enough fit when there are schools out there that do non-profit so much more enthusiastically.

Tomorrow I have Columbia in the evening and then Wednesday I am visiting Yale. Since I’m skipping MIT, I will have a free day and perhaps even pop into the Museum of Fine Art for some touristing!

 

I am going to need interview help!

I went for an interview for a volunteer position today and came away from it realizing that I will need to do some major preparation, and probably get interview coaching, if my MBA admission is going to depend on my interviewing skills!

There were a few things that I identified as being problems:

• It was behavioural and I couldn’t think of good enough examples on the spot
• I didn’t have a clear agenda/message on my side to get across
• I wasn’t as confident as I wanted to be
• I didn’t have a plan for addressing my weaknesses

Now, I’m not sure how the interview came across to the person on the other side of the table. I know that I tend to be harder on myself and others don’t notice the flaws that I would pick out, but… there was clearly room for improvement.

The silver lining in botching today’s interview is that I now know that this is a weaker area than I thought. So I know that there are other things to worry about first, but once this part comes around I am going to have to put more preparation work into it than I might have planned at first.