Tuesday, January 23, 2007

USC interview questions..

Questions from USC interview :

1. why dya want an MBA
2. why MBA now?
3. what’s a feedback u have received from ppl
4. wat’s a common misconception about u
5. wat’s ur leadership style
6. wat dya do in the spare time
7. which leader will represent ur leadership skill (HUH???)
8. if u’re the adcom and u’re reviewing ur own application, what dya think is the biggest weakness in the application
9. tell me bout ur career progress
10. tell me bout ur professional aspiration
11. gimme an example when you have failed miserably
12. show me a time where you show a leadership quality
13. what will you bring to USC
14. what do you not like about your current job

Damn! That’s a lot of questions for a 30 min interview..

1 comment:

Will said...

Hi there

Found your blog from admission411 website and it's very interesting.

Well, I have some questions related to the MBA interviews + goals and was wondering how you tackled them.

About myself. Born in Jakarta, went to Spore for my secondary school, skip JC, went to US for B.S. in Computer Engr and worked for the past 3 years in the semiconductor company.

I kinda take the whole application for granted. Didn't prepare much and I am sure my essays are very vague. Got dinged by 4 schools and invited to 1 school after I raised my GMAT from 650 to 710 (I think I was lucky enough to given a second chance).

Ok, here are the questions. Btw, thanks a lot.

1. How do you tackle leadership question? What are they actually looking for? The significance? I don't have any supervisory role at work. But I did become Permias President in college. =p

2. Failures. How did you tackle this? I read from the interview guides that they just wanted to know how I rebounce and learn from failures. But, somehow, those failures cannot be just like "lazy" etc. Cannot be too simple and cannot be so huge that there are no recourse.

3. This is a long one....
- In my essay which is very vague, I said that I want to be an entrepreneur in high-tech service provider. Then, I said for my short term MBA goals is to be an equity research analyst.
- Not sure what I was thinking then, but I know it's pretty hard to make the connection of going to IB as research analyst and the long term goal to be an entrepreneur. For most of the Indo student in the US, it's pretty common to go back to be an entreprenur.
- Do I need to have an viable business idea to begin with to tell the interview? How much detail I should be?
- I think I will drop the research analyst short term goal argument (I wanted to say that I want to become an analyst so that I can raise my own capital for my start-up company. Pretty lame, I know...)
- Instead, I am thinking management consulting dealing with start-up for my short-term MBA. Will they buy it?

Ok that's all. Thanks a lot for any help / comments. My interview is on 17th August (Indo's National Day). I hope it's a sign that I will WIN. =p