Hi guys, This is Shantanu Singh Yadav. I have secured admission at IIM Ahmedabad for 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 interview experience. I hope you find it useful.
Interview preparation:
Post the release of response sheets by IIM Kozhikode and realizing I was scoring 180+, I started my preparation for GD and PI. The first thing I did was to prepare an exhaustive write-up about myself, starting from academics, work experience, achievements, projects, interests, and hobbies, short- and long-term goals. Current affairs for GD and PI didn’t require much preparation owing to my habit of reading newspapers and magazines religiously. Coaching institutes would provide you with a lot of material on current affairs, world policy, and recent developments in various domains, etc. Still, since you prepared for VARC through reading newspapers and magazines, you’ll be able to relate to stuff on a much higher level, it’d be a cakewalk for you.
I attended a few sessions from experts, along with two mock GD and PI sessions, of which one was purely focused on my IIM Ahmedabad interview, which was only my second interview in a long list of 14-15 shortlists including IIM A, C, L, S, MDI, SPJIMR, XLRI, and IIFT. I also prepared a few core subjects from my engineering and mathematics, which eventually aided me a lot during my IIM A, C & L interviews. Interviewers mostly would look for a holistic personality in a candidate, so it’s better to go through what you studied in your undergrad. The interviewers would often ask you to explain some topic or concept just to gauge whether the time and money invested by you in your undergrad was worth it or not.
The Interview :
It began with the usual formal greetings and handshakes (oh yeah, pre-COVID times!), and the interviewers asked me about how the previous round went (most institutes have a WAT or GD or both before the PI) followed by questions and discussions on few topics from my undergrad. They asked me to choose a concept and explain the physical significance of it, for which I chose to talk on humidification and de-humidification and a few other topics from Mass Transfer.
This was followed by the usual question on why MBA and a couple of others on basic probability and statistics.
The panel asked me if I was comfortable with current affairs (as if I had a choice :p), to which I replied in affirmation. I was asked questions on Trump’s impeachment, Brexit, and the Middle East crisis. We had a very healthy and extended discussion on Trump’s impeachment, Pelosi’s stand, and conduct as the speaker and, of course, his current contender Joe Biden, and that is when I came to know that Joe has named his son Hunter.
Post this, I was asked some statistics, like India’s religion-wise & caste-wise divide along with the distribution of GDP among various sectors. I couldn’t provide them the exact numbers, but I was sure that my guess was pretty close to the actual data. The interview concluded with my views on the annual budget.
Two years of preparation, about 20 interviews, and still, I never received a toffee/cookie from the panel.
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