A Talk with MIT's Admissions Director
An excerpt from the Q&A:

Q: What should an MBA hopeful do to prepare for the Sloan interview?
A: We use a behavioral event interview (BEI) that a lot of MBA students are probably getting used to because it's what a lot of recruiters use. A BEI asks an applicant to recall details -- what the applicant said, thought, and might have felt -- during a critical event in the past. We use standard questions, which people post on the BusinessWeek Online forums, but the follow-up questions are different from those because each answer is different.

This year before we interview someone, we'll give them an interview preparation sheet that describes the kinds of interviews we do. There's a lot of material on the Web on BEI interviews and how one might prepare. It's different from the traditional MBA applicant interview because it doesn't ask you what you want to do after you graduate -- that's not a competency. We don't ask why you're applying to MIT because again, it's not a characteristic that's relevant to us.

Your best preparation is to be natural. Don't prepare a response. We're looking for something spontaneous. What did you say, think, and feel [during a critical event]? Those are the follow-up questions we ask. It's like peeling an onion until you get to the core.

The interviews last 45 minutes to an hour. Then we take about 15 minutes to write notes.

Q: How many applicants are invited to interview, and how many of them are accepted?
A: Around 30% of our applicants were invited to interview last year. And about 59% of those people were admitted.For the full version of this Q&A

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Comments from Student 1:
The Format: I was notified by email that an interviewer would be traveling to San Francisco to interview me. I was to call to schedule the exact time on one of two days.
The Interview: The interview was initially to be located in an office building in the financial district of San Francisco. However, due to inclement weather, all appointments were cancelled several days before the interview date. The interview was then rescheduled for a Saturday- my understanding is that all appointments originally scheduled for two days were moved to this new day. The new interview location was a hotel in downtown San Francisco, where the interviewer was staying; I was simply instructed to go to the hotel lobby. When I arrived for my appointment five minutes early (Tip Number Four: Always plan to arrive a few minutes early, I'm sure you can guess why) there was no one in the lobby and neither the concierge nor anyone on the staff had any idea that interviews were being held. In addition, I was told that my interviewer had checked out of the hotel several hours earlier and no one knew where he was. Panic began to set in, and I sat in a chair in the lobby, hoping someone would come and find me. (Tip Number Five: Don't panic. If something strange happens right before your interview, just take a deep breathe and keep your cool.) Fortunately, my interviewer eventually appeared, ushering me into a room right off of the lobby- he did not bother to close the door. I think the idea was to make the interview seem casual, as the room had walls made of glass that made it possible to see and be seen by all of San Francisco's downtown foot traffic walking by the hotel. However, in reality the location was something less than ideal.
My interviewer, the Director of the MBA Program, was obviously well prepared as he brought out a clipboard with papers and began to ask very specific questions. Fortunately, MIT actually provides a guide to their interview process, which I had downloaded and studied at length. (Tip Number Six: Don't over prepare. My interviewer actually stopped me to say, "You know, you can take some time to think about your answers before you speak." This didn't really help ease any of my tension, exacerbated by having to reschedule my interview, being told that my interviewer was gone, and then being interviewed in a totally inappropriate room. My guess is that I seemed over eager and that I was telling the interviewer what he wanted to hear, definitely not a good idea.) However, my interviewer was also bored and tired- it seemed that I was his last interview of the day, (Tip Number Seven: always schedule your interview for a morning, if you have the chance, thus minimizing the possibility that you will be the last interview of the day.)
Between his yawns my interviewer asked me questions like, "Describe a time when you managed a difficult group," and "Tell me about when you thought outside the box" questions that you would likely find in a "How to ace your business school interview" book. Fortunately, I had had one of those books. Unfortunately, as you'll remember from Tip Number Six, I had spent far too long preparing the perfect answers, and after only 20 minutes, my interview was abruptly ended when Mr. Director of the MBA Program asked me how long I thought it would take him to get the airport from the hotel, because he needed to leave soon.
I would say that this was the bonafide interview from hell, and I was not offered a place at Sloan. I only hope that no one else ever has this kind of experience. Fortunately, my incredibly bad interview was followed by a great one.

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Comments from Student 2:
I applied for MIT Sloan MBA program in Round 2 for fall 2004 entry. In early March Rod Garcia sent me the much awaited interview invitation. The bad news was that I had to travel abroad since they weren't providing interviews in Greece, but only in very few other European cities. I chose Paris, since I always wanted to visit it anyway. This already differentiated MIT from the other business schools I had previously interviewed for. All the other interviews were with local alumni who only knew me via my resume. Then, in the interview they went through my resume and asked all the usual questions about my past career, my future goals and the specific decision to pursue an MBA. They also asked questions about hypothetical situations, where I had to answer what I would do, in order to see my line of thinking.

There is a reason why Sloan does not provide interviews with alumni. David Capodilupo, who interviewed me, had already read my application and was familiar with its content. Besides, he was one of the few people that ultimately made admissions decisions. What those people cared for, now that the basic screening was already done, was to find out who the applicant was as a person. The goal was to get to know them in a face-to-face situation, not through the possibly more biased opinion of an alumnus, and get a feeling of their fit in the Sloan community. In other words, the fact that an applicant is invited for an interview means that he/she is already qualified for admission. Nevertheless, they want a last check and this last check is more of a personality one. So, in the question set the "usual suspects" were absent. No questions about my goals, no "Why MBA? Why now? Why Sloan?" The questions actually asked were practically the same ones found in the application. Questions about past situations with difficult interactions with other people, leadership or innovation demonstration, and so on.

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