After submitting your application, you endure weeks of nervous anticipation and then you finally get that invitation to interview. You start to prepare for the interview itself and you book your flight to campus, ready to prove yourself to the admissions committee. You take your tour, sit in on a class and head down to the admissions office only to find…. (gasp!) a second year MBA student waiting to interview you and he is wearing jeans, nonetheless! “How could they be taking me seriously? I must be in some second tier that the school really does not care about!” Take a deep breath and reconsider.

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This week’s article is written by guest author Amanda Albright Turner.

You studied tirelessly for the GMAT, courted old bosses for glowing recommendations, dazzled your interviewer and wrote arguably the best essays in the history of b-school.  Signed, sealed, delivered.

What happens next can seem like the proverbial black box.  We went behind the scenes with two admissions directors—Sara Neher at University of Virginia Darden School of Business and John Roeder at Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management to hear what takes place around the conference room table.

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You have a 720 and a 3.75 GPA. You have solid career progress and glowing recommendations. You have been actively volunteering in your community for years. You worked hard on your application and got your interviews, where you felt you did well. And…. You did not get in. So, you must have done something terribly wrong in your interview, right? You must have unwittingly made a mess of your essays, right? Your profile is strong so your execution is off, right? Not necessarily.

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With the interviewing season in full swing, I thought it would be valuable to share some of the questions that are being reported from among the most competitive programs. Obviously, you have to be well prepared for the standard questions: Why an MBA? Why this school? What are your short term/long term career goals? How cool is Ben?
(okay, scratch that last one). You get the idea.

Yes, you’ll be asked the questions above. But, there are scores of others you need to be ready for. These can be lumped roughly into five categories.

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It’s MBA interview season, which doesn’t mean you get a free pass to stress out. In fact, if you keep the four “must-knows” in mind during your interview prep and during the big event itself, you’ll find that acing the MBA admissions interview doesn’t need to drive you crazy.

In fact once you sort out the following five key elements, you’ll feel more relaxed and more confident—two “must-haves” for interview success!

So, what are these secret ingredients?

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With interview invitations from a number of programs already on their way out to Round One applicants, we wanted to offer Beat The GMAT readers some advice on this critical element of the admissions process. While we have previously offered tips about interview etiquette and suggested approaches when ‘interviewing the interviewer’, we’ll focus today’s post on a few fundamental steps one should take to effectively prepare for an MBA admissions interview.

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For most MBA programs, being granted an interview is your first step toward acceptance into business school. It’s the opportunity for you to make yourself come alive to the admissions committee and show them why you should be included in their upcoming class. It’s also a time that many candidates have a hard time setting themselves apart from all the other candidates and verbalizing their individual value proposition. Listen in as we discuss the business school interviews with the admission’s directors of various MBA programs and see what they recommend in order to ace your interview.

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Some call it an interview while others call it a brutal screening tool.  I call it a conversation. Since I am a psychology guy at heart, I always like to change the outlook and make it easier for me to deal with what is at hand.

First of all, just as many of your conversations with your friends, family and colleagues are different, so will be the ones with the b-schools as they don’t all follow the same template.  As I used to tell my players (I was a soccer coach for 15 years), “psych yourself up”, not out.  So that is what we are going to do here.  Here is my coaching coming back into play:

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