Interview Experience At SJMSOM (Batch Of '24)

Hey everyone, this is Manish Naik. I am joining IIT B - Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management for their flagship MBA program batch of 2024 and would like to share my interview experience of the same.

The SJMSOM interview was held on the "Gather" platform, which is an online interactive gamified website where you enter as a tiny digital character. You can control that character and move around the screen, much like in a game. The entire platform is customized with various rooms and tables for the different steps in the interview process.
The table assigned to me had other interviewees of the same engineering discipline (ECE). Being an online platform, it had options to voice chat, share media and
video calling. We had an AdCom member as our supervisor and guide who explained the entire process and soon began the interviews. In the meantime, we had Mr. Bean playing on screen to calm our nerves.  The panel interviewing our table had 3 members, a core ECE faculty of IITB, a management professor, and an alumnus.

My turn came and I was escorted by our guide to the interview room. The interview started with me giving my introduction and a few lines on
aspirations. The ECE Professor started with the round of questioning and asked about topics like satellite and drone imagery, cameras, and a few other applications.
To my surprise, he was very focused on the practicality aspect and less on my theoretical knowledge. So naturally, I tried and answered
everything as logically as I could, and we ended up having a fruitful discussion.
Next, the other male panelist, an Alumni of SJMSoM started with his questions. They were all current affairs based, ranging from the Russia- Ukraine war to the achievements in the Olympics. I could not answer a few questions related to India's performance in the Olympics but overall, it went well.
He then passed onto the management professor and she asked me some common questions like why I wanted to pursue MBA and what were my goals after that. She ended it after a few questions on finance and RBI as I had stated those as my interest.
The interview ended and I was quite content. It was a peaceful experience overall compared to a couple of other more stressful ones. It focused less on raw knowledge, and more on out of the box thinking.