How To Prepare For A B-School Interview? || Anuj Gupta, FMS, Delhi' 22

What to expect from this article?: This piece will guide you on how to start. How to prepare for a B-School interview and what to prepare. This article will give you clarity on how to plan your coming days and ace your interview.

So, let me grab my cup of coffee, and then we will start.

Divide
So, the very first step of any interview preparation is to research what all types of questions are asked. So, basically what you have to do is divide the interview questions into a set of categories and prepare each category. And to make things easy, let me categorize the questions for you.

Category	Type of Questions
Introduction and Family Background	This category includes your introduction, a few basic things about yourself, and your family background. This is the starting point of any interview preparation. Prepare an intro, about your family, city, birthplace, etc.
Academics	This category includes questions from your past education. You should be prepared with at least one subject of your graduation. Sometimes the interviewer asks you to tell your favorite subject and sometimes not. Also prepare an answer for the drop in marks, if there is any. Work-ex people should focus less on this as they are mostly asked from their work experience.
Work-Experience	People with work experience should invest a good amount of time in this section as there are always some questions on work-ex and these questions can further decide where the interview will go.
Career Goals	This section talks about what are your future aspirations both in terms of personal and professional life. Brainstorm your goals and reflect on how an MBA and the B-school will help you achieve them. Questions like why MBA, why this B-school, why an engineer going for an MBA etc. forms part of this category.
Hobbies and Extra-curriculars	One of the most interesting sections to prepare for those who have a hobby to talk about. When you are talking about a hobby, the interviewer expects you to know some famous personalities in that field, current and past happenings around it, how it helps you, etc.
POR and Achievements	PORs have a great potential to prove that you are a great fit for a B-school. Try to mention your POR(s) and achievement(s) in the introduction if you are confident of handling questions from them. POR shows some behavioral traits in you which are important for a manager to have.
Behavioural Questions (Stories)	There might be questions on certain behavioral traits like leadership, team player, planning, etc. The interviewer expects you to tell him/her some past instances where you showed such traits. So, prepare a list of traits that a manager should have. Search for some story in your past where you showed that trait and do so for each trait. Do the same for your strengths and be ready with an answer on how you are working on your weaknesses.

Conquer
Now that you have prepared a category list. Write all the questions which you can think of in that category. Writing answers to those would be a time-consuming task so you can just go through them on a daily basis orally. So, you are done with two things:

Categorizing questions
Preparing a basic set of questions

Now comes the most important task: Tree Building.

Tree Building

Before I tell you what this is, see the below tree:

After seeing the above tree, you might have got an idea of what I am talking about. Your answer decides the next question and the answer to this next question decides further questions. B-school interviews are unstructured types of interviews where the interviewer does not come with a prepared list of questions. He/she gives you the power to guide the interview in whichever direction you want on the basis of your answers. And this is where the tree comes in.

Once you are done with preparing the introduction, see what questions can be asked from the introduction. These form the branches of the tree. Now, have an answer for as many branches as you can think of coming out of the introduction. Now, take each branch and repeat the same process. Repeat this daily and most of your interview preparation is done. Think as many cross questions as possible and then think of cross-questions on these cross-questions.

Other things to cover
There can be some questions on current affairs. This part, I will cover in the next article on GD / WAT prep. Apart from that, some B-schools ask questions related to statistics and mathematics. Go through the past B-school interview experience, you will get an idea of what to prepare when it comes to mathematics and statistics.