The Application Process

Academic performance, leadership experiences and professional achievements have been considered sure shot ways of cracking a B-school interview. But in this difficult job market, schools are now more and more concerned about post-MBA career paths of prospective students. Hence acing interviews and converting them to admission offers has become much more competitive. In such a scenario you as a B-school aspirant need to differentiate yourself from other applicants. Consequently it's imperative that you leverage your industry experience as a major tool to ace B-school Interviews.

Pre-interview stage - Preparation

1) Business Metrics: Understand the importance of your pre-MBA work in terms of the corporate level metrics e.g. sales, profit, differentiation, innovation, and time to market, product rollout that are affected. How was your day to day work impacting business metrics?

2) A well-informed individual: Understand the landscape of your pre-MBA industry in terms of identifying end customers or users of your products/services, the value chain of your company's business, its market growth and prospects of that sector in different time horizons.

3) Industry Trends: Read a lot about what are the key trend changers in your industry, recent advancements in people, process or technology.

During the Interview

4) Professional Achievements: In your interview do talk about any sales, business development and client interfacing roles that you have handled. While this may sound an obvious thing to do, many interviewees forget this simple fundamental and go on talking about sub-standard stuff. Your professional achievements should get significant air-time during your interview.

5) Be specific: Refrain from using jargon. Specific examples in Situation, Action, Result and Impact format could really increase credibility to your profile.
Always remember that attention to details and getting your hands dirty in industry job is something adcoms of top B-schools appreciate. Hence do not shy away showcasing your work on such projects.

[Author is an MBA from ISB and mentor at Ivyctor.com]

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