Wharton Visit and Interview

I scheduled my interview with Wharton on 12/1 at 2.15 pm. I planned to reach Wharton by 9.00 am, so that I can attend the 9.00 am and 10.30 am classes. But delays in picking up rental car and traffic due to accidents made me reach Wharton only at 10.25 am, just in time to sneak into the Competitive Strategy and Industrial Structure class by Louis Thomas. The first 5 minutes went over my head. Then I was able to follow it better. It was teaching the application of Game Theory in Job Tournaments. It was about how promotions are made in Legal/Consulting firms. He gave lectures during the first 10 min and last 10 min and in between he guided the class discussion. I got to know the fact that married people make 10 to 15% more money than singles and also are more likely to get promoted. To reinforce this fact Dr Thomas used a video clip from ‘Sex and the City’ where Miranda was ready to be pseudo Lesbian to get her promotion. What am I going to do? The class was over at 11.45 am.

Back in the admissions room, I spend few minutes talking to other prospective students. There were many prospective students who were planning to apply in round 2. At noon, I decided to spend sometime with first years as part of lunch with first year student program. Though I had attended similar session earlier, I went for it to know about latest updates. All of us grabbed lunch from Au Bon Pain restaurant located at the ground floor of the Huntsman Hall and assembled in a classroom. Five first year students and one second year student (the famous AFleming from S2S forum) lead the discussion. It was an open Q&A session. Most of the questions were elementary and I would have answered them (If I were admitted last year, I would have got that opportunity). Only new information I got was that the Global Consulting Practicum consists mostly of first year students. Since it was an elective, I thought it would be more of the second year students. The Q&A session ended around 1.20 pm.

At 1.30 pm I joined the campus tour. I have not been on one before. The Jon M Huntsman Hall, built in 2002 is where most of the core courses are conducted and also shared by 2400 undergraduate students. The Huntsman hall has many classrooms, discussion rooms, computer labs and an auditorium. The Executive education is conducted at Steinberg Conference Center. And many electives courses are held at Dietrich Hall, the original Wharton School of Finance and Commerce. And around the Dietrich Hall is the Steinberg Hall. These buildings are accessible through Locust Walk behind Huntsman hall and not visible from Walnut Street. I had to cut short the tour at 2.00 pm and return to the admissions office from my interview at 2.15 pm.

The interviewer was a second year student. After her introduction, we discussed about the class I attended and she explained the interview process – a 30 minutes blind interview with 25 min for her to ask questions and 5 min for me. I told her that I knew the process well because I interviewed on-campus last year. Still I did not get the much wanted question “How has your candidacy improved since you last interviewed?” Some of the question I was asked are
1. Explain about your career progress since you graduated? She interrupted me in-between to know details about how many people I managed and details about the business of each firm. I interruptions helped me to explain my long career better than giving a monotonous lecture for 5 min.
2. How do you manage a global team?
3. How do you motivate your team members?
4. How do you deal with challenges in your team?
5. What are you career goals? Here we went in tangent discussing about the non-profit I started because it fits within my career goal and then came back to short term goals
6. Why MBA?
7. Why Wharton?
8. What extra-curricular activities would you take part while you are at Wharton? I should have mentioned this while addressing why Wharton
9. What are the attributes of a good leader?
10. What is your leadership style?
11. Anything you want to add to say or add to your application?
12. Questions for me? Here we were talking about her internship, her career change from finance consulting to Strategy consulting and her experience at Wharton. Our nice conversation has to be stopped as she had a class at 3.00 pm. So we stopped at 2.45 pm

Overall the interview was conversational. I was able to talk about many things I wanted to convey, but still after coming out I identified few things that I did not cover. Then I had to convince myself that 25 min is not much time to talk about all those things.
I skipped the information session at 3.00 pm; instead I went around and took pictures of the campus. Finally, I left Wharton around 3.30 pm. If it had been a Thursday I could have attended the MBA Pub event, but I could not get an interview slot on Nov 20th and did not want to take it to the last day for interview, which is Dec 4th. Now I have my fingers crossed and waiting for the final decision on Dec 22nd.