Hi guys, This is Jaideep Tanwar. I have secured admission at IIM Calcutta, in its prestigious MBA programme for the academic year 2020-22. Recently, I had shared my CAT 2019 preparation story on InsideIIM. You can read it here. In this article, however, I will take you through my IIM-C interview experience. I hope you find it useful.
Since the last three years, the CAT authorities have been releasing the answer keys and your answer sheets within a week of the exam day. So, you get a fair idea if you would be getting your desired calls or not by November-end itself. In my case, I knew that I should start preparing for the interviews.
This phase is a lot simpler as you have only three things to cover here: current affairs, your academic subjects, and behavioural questions. Now, one especially useful extra thing that you should do is to read the past interview transcripts of any college whose interview you are about to attend. For example, I read many such interview accounts of IIM Calcutta, and I realised that a lot of times IIM-C tries to put the candidates under stress. So, I was prepared for it.
Come interview day, I was given a calm start with some easy questions, but it soon spiralled into the panellists trying to unsettle me. I had it in the back of my mind that they just saw how I could handle pressure and so I kept calm and answered every question to the best of my ability without getting uneasy.
Walking out of the interview room, I was not sure about how I performed. Come 13th of May; I had this doubt cleared when I received a mail stating that I had been selected for IIM-Calcutta's MBA programme in the first list itself.
Some
interview tips that I think may help the other aspirants:
•
Be thorough with your undergrad basics. While getting asked only easy questions is good for you, it can become terrible for you if you are not able to answer even these basic ones.
• Whichever question requires your analysis,
adopt a pros versus cons approach where you state these in front of the interviewer to arrive at your conclusion.
• The panellists often ask some
current affairs question related to your undergrad stream. So, start reading news regularly. It will help your confidence on the interview day and will also help you to supplement your answers with extra info.
• It is crucial, to
be honest, but keep your political and extremist (if you have any) views with you. It helps to be a little diplomatic.
This was my journey. I hope those of you who are reading this get helped by this. If you also get through, don't forget to share your journey with the others too. All the best.
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