Being a GEM Fresher, I was told by many of my friends that it was a waste of money to apply separately to top colleges. B-Schools want people with work experience only!
Hearing this made me question whether I should fill the form for SJMSOM, but thank god I did. Now, I knew that the interview would have to be an excellent one for me to even have a chance of getting into SOM. I was reading anything and everything from engineering to current affairs. I thought I was well prepared by the time of the interview.
Then came the day of the interview. You can ask any MBA aspirant about which college had the best admission procedure. Everyone will definitely say SJMSOM's was the best. The entire admissions process is student-driven. So there is zero involvement of the teachers or staff. They had created an interactive platform on Gather Town. You can check it
here. Volunteers were assisting at every step. It really felt like an offline interview. This experience was so good that now I really wanted to get admitted to SOM.
Now, to summarize my interview:
4 Panelists - SJMSOM Finance HOD, 1 Civil Professor from IIT-B, 2 Alumni (Finance and Operations Fields)
The Civil Professor started the interview by asking me to introduce myself and then asked questions about my B. Tech project. He then asked questions about the core civil engineering subjects. Then the alumni from Finance asked me about how I invest in stocks, what my strategy is, and asked me about important financial ratios. The other alumni asked me questions about general awareness and news.
So the interview covered a wide range of topics. But I couldn't answer some questions, so I thought SJMSOM was out of the picture. But now that I look back on my interview, I realized that
it's not the correct answers that matter. It's how you arrive at them, and how you present them to the panel. Also, being confident and having a smile throughout helped me a lot but I wasn't sure if I'll be selected.
Skip to a few months later, and I'm writing this article here so I could help other B-School aspirants. If you ask me how I made it to SOM, I would say that all I needed was a lot of hard work and little luck.
My only tip to the aspirants would be this -
You just give your best and let your destiny take care of the rest.