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What Do Panelists Ask During MBA Admission Interviews?

Mar 21, 2022 | 12 minutes |

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What do panelists ask during the MBA Admission interviews? Is there a set pattern? Is it based on your profile or are only hot topics asked? In the third part of the 20 recommended interview experiences, we bring to you interview experiences where Batman was involved, to the gender wage gap, to creating a COVID wave graph. Read on! Read Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven't already!

IIM Ahmedabad Interview Experience - 2021, Harshit Ahuja

2: Are you following current affairs? Any recent news that you came across. Me: Mentioned few P2: Haven't you heard about Suez Canal? Me: Told that yes I know, explained a bit about what happened there (Also mentioned its sort of obstructing the field) and how it affected the trade. P2: Okay Harshit, you can leave.

IIM Ahmedabad Interview Experience - 2021, Saksham

P1: Which sports? Me: Cricket and chess. P1: Asked me names of various deliveries wrt to the length of the ball. Me: Answered Full toss, Yorker, full length, good length, and short length. P1 seemed happy and said well. Handed over to P2. P2: Have you heard of the gender wage gap. Me: Explained. P2: Asked why it existed. Me: Told it was going on for a long time and fewer job opportunities for women meant they agreed to work at lower wages.

IIM Bangalore Interview Experience - 2021, Shambhavi Mukund Joshi

3) P1: So you are saying that these ideas gestate for some years but eventually make it to the market right?
Me: Said that it is not true with all novel innovations and gave example of what R.T.Krishnan, IIM Bangalore director had said in 2004 conference and also how IIM B had helped such bio innovations to scale up their businesses in 2020.
4) P2: So what is biofilm?
Me: Answered
5) P2: If I ask you to sell it to Apollo hospital, how will you do it?
Me: Said that Apollo won't be new to this problem as it is faced by every healthcare facility so I won't need to convince much as it is a novel product.

IIM Bangalore Interview Experience - 2021, Zephyr

P3: more about my work experience, for ~5 solid minutes
- Answered
P3: Do you think the govt should interfere if people choose to smoke weed? Is it their business?
- Answered
P3: That's it, do you have questions for us? If not log out.

IIM Calcutta Interview Experience - 2021, Shambhavi Mukund Joshi

1) So your father is an engineer and your mother is a doctor, right? Tell us about your maternal and paternal grandparents. What was their occupation?
(Answered - My maternal great grandfather was a schoolmaster in rural Konkan and there is a book about him so I mentioned that as well)
2) Did he inspire anyone in your family, someone from the new generation who is pursuing teaching as a profession?
(No Sir, not anyone that I know of. Told them about my family drifting apart and loss of contact with 6 of the 9 siblings my grandma had)
3) What can you infer from this?
(Answered - 2 observations)
4) Tell us something about yourself?
5) Why Microbiology?
(Answered) I asked if they want to know the reason why I would like to pursue an MBA after microbiology, but P1 said we know you have a compelling reason for that.....so we don't want to know.
6) How Pfizer vaccine is different from traditional ones? (Explain to the layman).   (Answered)

IIM Calcutta Interview Experience - 2021, Minhaj Ahmed

P2 – Don’t you think you have made a mistake? Upon realizing I had made a silly mistake, I hurriedly tried to change it, but the panellist said no need and gave me another problem on logarithms. My nervousness increased even further, and I felt less confident after ruining such an easy chance. I completed the following sum but took a lot of time and fumbled quite a bit. In the first 5 minutes of the interview, I had already accepted my fate and bid my chances goodbye. Just as I had lost a chunk of my confidence, P1 picked up on something from the interview application form we had to fill out.
P1 – So tell me, who is the music composer of The Dark Knight? I had written that I love watching movies in the hobbies section and that The Dark Knight was my favourite film. Shifting the conversation to this helped me regain my confidence.
M - Hans Zimmer.
P2 – Which country is he from?
M – I’m not sure of this, but it might be Sweden. (Explained that the name sounded Nordic to me. Nonetheless, it was not the correct answer. Zimmer is German)
P2 – Could be German as well, no? No worries. Let’s move on.
P1 – Who played the role of Joker?
IIM Indore Interview Experience - 2021, Vedant Dalal

P1: Have you completed your graduation?

Me: No

P1: So what are you pursuing and from where?

Me: Answered

P1: Are you doing any projects in college?

Me: Shared my project details

P1: So you have studied Computer Networks?

Me: Yes Sir

P1 then went on to ask questions on networks for roughly 10 mins, asked about different layers, their role. Also went on to ask about Analog to Digital converter, in which layer it is, where is sequencing done, how will it hamper.


IIM Indore Interview Experience - 2021, Siddhant Jain

1. What are multicore processors? What is their architecture? RISC in computer architecture.

2. What is back piping in Linux?

3. When you open multiple tabs in windows, it hangs. Why do users have to close the tabs and OS doesn't handle the stuff itself?

4. What is array decay? How do windows handle array decay? What is memory leakage? What happens during memory leakage?

5. What are semaphores?


IIM Lucknow Interview Experience - 2021, Sanjana Garg

M2: Hi Sanjana

P- Good afternoon sir.

M2: Good afternoon! No, wait it's almost good evening.

P: (Almost taken aback) Umm. Yes sir, Good evening.

M2: Tell us something about yourself.

P: Told well-prepared answer. But for some reason, they did not ask anything so I blurted out a thank you.

M2: You finished the interview already ( Both laughing like crazy)

P: No sir, I just…….( Laughed with them a bit)


IIM Lucknow Interview Experience - 2021, Arkaprobha Das

Y: Do you know what a normal distribution is?
Me: Yes, sir. It is shaped like a bell. The equation is….(Y stops me)
Y: No no. I don’t want the equation. Tell me practical instances where we can observe a normal distribution.
Me: The weight of the population of India or any country.
Y: Okay, good! Give me another one.
Me: The graph of COVID cases….(unsure)
Y: No no…that is not at all a normal distribution. Tell me what is a standard normal distribution.
Me: Sir, a normal distribution with mean 0 and standard deviation 1.
Y: Okay. Do you know the Traveling Salesman Problem?

IIM Kozhikode Interview Experience - 2021, Anushka Saha

P1: So normally the reverse repo rate is kept at 3.75 percentage points. But suddenly the RBI went ahead and reduced it to 3.35 percentage points. Why do you think the RBI did this?

Me: Spoke about how it wanted to stimulate the economy by reducing the cost of investment to overcome the pandemic's impact. (He didn't look very convinced)

P1: Yes that's the general reason. What does the reverse repo mean?

Me: Answered that as it is the rate at which commercial banks park their excess deposits with the central bank.


IIM Kozhikode Interview Experience - 2021, Mihir Dharap

1. Tell me something about your work ex

2. Do you like your current job? Why do you want to leave it?

3. So why do you want to do an MBA?

4. How do you think you will succeed in an MBA?

5. What was your rank in college?

6. You have mentioned C, C++ in your form (I hadn’t, idk why they said so), how good are you at those? (Told that I use C in my day-to-day work as that is the best for coding hardwares and a bit of python. Have exposure to C++ and Java from college days but have lost touch)


FMS Interview experience - 2021, Anushika Srivastava

M: So Anushika, tell us something about yourself?
Me: Told a prepared answer starting with the meaning of my name, covering a few highlights of my academic scores, achievements, work experience, hobbies and finally ending with a quote, which I referred to as the motto of my life.
M: What were your subjects at Graduation?
Me: Physics, Chemistry, and Maths.
F: Can you tell us something about your work and which was the last story that you covered?
Me: Told her about my typical day at work- right from setting the agenda to interviewing women and looking for stories that can be published. Also told her about the last interview that I covered which involved a businesswoman.
F: You seem to be enjoying your work, why this shift from Science to Journalism and now to MBA?

XLRI Interview Experience - 2021, Akshika Rawat

Me: Good Evening, Sir.

P3: Hi Akshika, seems like we kept you waiting for quite a long time, you look nervous. Have some water if you want.

Me: Smiled and said, “Thank you, Sir, I'm fine” (which I was not, totally!)

P1: Okay then let's start the interview. Akshika, you're doing Btech, right?

Me: Yes sir, I'm in my final year.

P1: So did you sit for your campus placements or yet to appear for those?

(I wanted to go like, LoL, we don't do that stuff at our college - Pantnagar people can understand)

Me: No sir, I didn't. Actually, we don't have a lot many(saying zilch would have been very depressing) companies coming to our campus. There were a few that traced us through online mediums but I didn't go for those.


XLRI Interview Experience - 2021, Ritik Garg

M1- From where are you joining for this interview?

Me- Sir currently I am in my home town Alwar, Rajasthan.

M1- Tell me something about important or famous things from your city?

Me- Told, so while telling them I told them about the Bhangarh fort in Alwar and stated that it is the fourth most haunted place in the world and the most haunted place in Asia.

M1- How can you say it is the most haunted place in Asia, on what parameters these rankings were given?

Me- Sir I am not sure about the parameters, perhaps from real-life experiences or observations.

M1- You are an electrical engineer use that knowledge and tell me.

Me- Told them about the variations in the magnetic fields and how there are devices that are used to measure these variations like magnetometers and electromagnetic field detectors.

M1- Okay, so tell me what did you learn in Jaipur apart from engineering?


IIM Shillong Interview Experience - 2021, Anshika Singh

M1: How do you know who is buying your product?

A: Sir, there is a pixel attached to both our account and website, that pixel tracks all the data about the customers like how much time they are spending, which category of a page they are visiting and many more help us in understanding the buyer's journey and in future it helps us in retargeting. Also, by Facebook analytics, we get all the data about the customer’s age group, place, and type of device they used to buy.

M1: So you know data analytics?

A: No sir.

M1: Then how do you analyse the data?

A: There is a feature known as account overview in Facebook business manager, from there we can export data about the demographics of our customers.

M1: What is the unit of strength?


IIM Shillong Interview Experience - 2021, Abhilash Maji

Q2. Why didn't you finish your Ph.D.?

A. Explained that my research work was not going so well in the last leg. Although I had finished two papers the second paper still needed more refinement and I had not started on the third paper. Additionally, my teaching experience gave me an insight that this was not something I enjoyed doing so much and would like to stop. All this motivated me not to further extend my contract beyond June 2019, and thus I came back home.

Q3. What were your research areas?

A. Microfinance and International Trade. Also explained the Randomized Control Trial I helped run on the field in Nairobi.

Q4. What did you do in Microfinance?

A. I worked on setting up lending contracts that are self-enforcing and don't require collateral, a feature prevalent in micro-finance. The Model assumes homogeneous agents where the group member chooses to work diligently and monitor his partner(costly peer monitoring) to ensure compliance. I extend the multi-agent principal-agent model with costly peer monitoring developed in Carli & Uras (2017) by relaxing the assumption of perfect monitoring. The core result of one of the agents receiving a higher expected return to compensate for higher volatility is preserved, albeit under more stringent conditions. Finally, I evaluate a threshold level of imperfect monitoring beyond which a sustainable joint-liability contract is no longer feasible.