The Road To My BITSoM Admit | Sophie Mathews

My Background
I completed my Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering in 2020, followed by 18 months of work experience in the Quality Assurance domain with Cognizant.

Why BITSoM?
The year BITSoM was founded I saw BITSoM’s advertisement in the newspaper. On researching further, I decided to apply for it in the upcoming year with my GMAT scores. This year BITSoM was one of the first colleges I applied to. Apart from BITSoM, I had also received admits from 3-4 other prestigious institutes. I chose BITSoM over the others because it was a 2-year MBA program with faculties at par or much better than the other colleges. As an engineer, I wanted a complete 2 years to fully understand business management instead of rushing through it. BITSoM was also perfectly located in Mumbai and the batch size was much smaller as compared to a batch of 700-800 students, I knew I would learn a lot more with focused attention and over 2 years I would get the chance to interact with the entire batch and learn from each student.
BITSoM appealed to me because it stood out from the other colleges in terms of its curriculum, the faculty they had and the opportunities it offered. The previous cohort was also very diverse which helped me realise that peer-to-peer learning would be much better. On reading up further the summer internship report was very impressive with big companies coming to a brand-new college. The fact that it was in Mumbai with a beautiful campus was a bonus.

Pre-Interview Prep:
I was nail-biting nervous before the interview. To prep for the interview, I tailored my answers for all the generic MBA questions to be specific for BITSOM. The biggest challenge I faced while prepping for the interview was answering the question Why BITSoM? Since it was a new college, there was not much data I could look up on the internet for this answer. I spent time researching the courses that interested me and the professors that would be teaching them. Apart from that, I spent time going over my CV to understand what it was that I would be uniquely offering BITSoM as an individual.

Interview Experience:
I was interviewed by Mr Narottam Kishore-the Head of Admissions and Outreach at BITSoM along with a BITS alum. Within the first few minutes, they made me feel at ease and assured me this was going to be more of a conversation than an interview. We started out discussing my job what my role there was and what I had learnt. I explained what my project was and what was my role in the project. I also highlighted the business importance of my role and what it had taught me. Having worked on Salesforce I spent time discussing that and how it could help me in my MBA. I was also asked about the advantages of my job and if I could excel there and why I was pursuing an MBA. I talked about the advantages and disadvantages of my job and where I saw my career going, I explained how in the long term an MBA fit into my plan. I was then asked about my extracurricular activities in college and what learning experiences I had gained there. I talked about how I was heading the college magazine during my engineering which led to them asking me about the challenges I faced while heading the team. They also came up with possible scenarios and asked me what I would have done in each case. For instance, if you had a team member who didn’t work what did you do? Or what would happen if the team disagreed with the lead, how would you handle that situation? Since most of these situations I had faced, I answered honestly and added what I could have done better. I was also asked about the time I had worked with NGOs since that was something I had put in my application. I mostly spoke about what I had learnt while working in those NGOs and asked if BITSoM had any opportunities for me to continue working in the social sector. Narottam sir then explained the unique concept of Social Live Projects to me. In my hobbies I had mentioned reading so we spent a little time talking about the most recent book I had read, comparing it to the movie it had been made into and similar books I could read. I expressed my preference for the book over the movie which they asked me to justify. I answered by explaining how books gave my imagination a lot of freedom as compared to movies which visualised everything for me.
Overall, the interview was a very thorough process, they spent over 40 minutes with me. They went over nearly every point in my CV and really tried to understand me as a person. By the end of the interview, I was at ease and happy with the interview I had given.