Interview invitations are coming hot and heavy right now – congrats to all of you who’ve landed one so far! Exciting times!
So what do you need to do to get ready?
First of all — the most important advice we can offer — you need to PRACTICE. Please do not underestimate the importance of prep at this stage!
That’s not all you need though.
If you’re interviewing at Chicago Booth or MIT Sloan or HBS, then somewhere in the midst of the actual interview, you’ll need to write another essay.
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But no worries, you’re likely to find this one exciting! Because you’ve already gotten the interview and that should give you some spring in your step and some renewed vigor and motivation, and this essay (which hopefully is your last!) likely won’t be quite as grueling an experience.
Or…. maybe not. š
The questions that Booth and MIT ask aren’t that easy, and you need to get those essays done pretty fast. The Harvard one has to get done even faster, with only 24 hours after the interview to submit your Post-Interview Reflection. We touch on the Harvard assignment very briefly in our Harvard MBA Application Guide; it’s only a few pages so we’re not saying you should buy it just for this part since it’s admittedly a bit limited, though in its entirety, it could possibly be helpful as an overall resource for identifying your content for the interview. Same deal with Chicago Booth: We have a section in the Booth MBA Application Guide but it’s more of an overview. If you already have the Booth guide then definitely study it now that you’re in this position of interviewing! But we’re not really recommending that someone pick it up only for insights into how to write the essay itself (still likely valuable overall, we just don’t want to misrepresent how much content there is on this specific piece).
For MIT however, we do go into some depth on the “mission” essay in our MIT Sloan MBA Application Guide so that one can be particularly useful in taking advantage of this important interview-essay opportunity.
(If you had previously purchased one of these guides this season and your subscription expired, you can get it reactivated for cheap – please reach out and Team EssaySnark will help you out.)
And now brand-new to help many of you:
We’ve just launched the Interview Express Essay Review to specifically support those of you writing essays in conjunction with the interview experience at Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan, or Chicago Booth.
The Interview Express Essay Decimator gives you super fast feedback and most important, we read through your full application, and consider your topic in the context of everything else you’ve already presented to your school. You don’t get any feedback on the app itself but we do incorporate the whole pitch into our recommendations about your essay.
We also have the Custom Interview Questions service for any interviews conducted by the admissions committee, where your interviewer has read your entire application before they meet you. This is specifically for HBS but also ideal and optimized for MIT or NYU, and can be useful for other schools like LBS or INSEAD or many others as well (even for blind interviews!). It lets you practice questions specific to you and your own situation. We hear it’s invaluable!
And of course for everyone and anyone going for the interview at any school in the world, the most obvious resource of all: This blahg and all of our posts on interviewing, and our MBA Interviewing Guide which is super cheap and you practically can’t afford NOT to get it!
We wish you great good luck at this stage! You’ve come so far — now just one more big opportunity to impress the adcoms!!! Let us know if we can help and we can’t wait to hear it turns out for you!
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