Archives For interview

Patty’s Path to Wharton: Admissions Interview (Part 6 of 8)

kfaircloth —  October 11, 2011 — 3 Comments

Patty at WhartonThis is part 6 of a series featuring b-school advice gleaned from one of Manhattan GMAT’s own. Until recently, Patty managed marketing and student services for our sister company, Manhattan LSAT. But she chose to return to business school and started at Wharton last fall. She has agreed to share her application experiences with us  in a series called, “Patty’s Path to Wharton.”
Read Part 5 here.

This week, we’re chatting with Patty about the admissions interview. She compares the experience—especially when it takes place at a coffee shop—to a first date. “You wonder what they look like, but you don’t want to be creepy and you don’t want to ask every person in the café. Should I have worn a rose?” As for the awkward question of who buys, she says there are two solutions. “You can get there early and buy your own, or just pay if you arrive at the same time. Offer politely, but if they say no and insist, that’s fine. Like a date.”

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mbaMission’s Exclusive Interview with University of Pennsylvania – Wharton Director of Admissions Ankur Kumar

cclay —  September 21, 2011 — 7 Comments

Ankur Kumar, Wharton Director of AdmissionsThis post appears in its entirety on the mbaMission blog.

Recently,  mbaMission was fortunate enough to speak with Ankur Kumar, the new director of admissions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Here are some highlights from our conversation, followed by the full transcript below.

  • During the upcoming admissions cycle, Wharton plans to pilot a group interview exercise, which could become a mandatory application component in the future.
  • Students often see class profiles as a set of preferences, but they only reveal the industries that students came from immediately prior to business school; industry experience is much deeper than it may appear.
  • Wharton is seeking quality experience, not a target age or number of years of work experience.

mbaMission: So my first question is, Wharton kind of caused a stir when it switched to behavioral interviews last year, and I was curious why the change was made and what Wharton was trying to learn that it maybe couldn’t learn from its previous process.

Read the rest of the interview here.

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Interviewers Are Not Out to Trick You

cclay —  April 20, 2010 — 4 Comments

Several news outlets recently wrote about a list of strange questions that you might encounter in a business school admissions interview.

The admissions process is stressful enough without having to worry about which type of tree you think you would be if you were a tree. Thankfully, our partner mbaMission has confirmed that it is very unlikely you will be asked such a question. In fact, they’ve conducted interviews with top admissions officers at Yale, Tuck and Kellogg, and all of the officers said their goal for interviews is to get a feel for the applicants and who they really are. They are not looking for how quickly prospective students can answer strange questions on their toes. A new mbaMission blog posting notes:

We feel that our responsibility as an admissions consulting firm is to calm MBA candidates and keep them focused on what is truly important within the application process. Interviews are not easy, but overwhelmingly the questions are straightforward and will be about you. So, you should be able to rely on your experiences to answer the questions. By entering your interview calmly and staying in your everyday frame of mind, you will be able to thoughtfully address the questions that you are asked. If you can do that, you should perform to the best of your abilities and you may even enjoy your interview.

You can read the rest of the blog post, which includes quotes from interviews with top admissions officers, here.

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