Interview Guides
Clear Admit Interview GuidesBe as prepared as possible for your MBA interviews this season with the Clear Admit Interview Guides! School-specific sample questions and in-depth strategy, campus visit details and places to stay.

Interview Reports

A selection of interview field reports from fellow applicants posted to the MBA Admissions Wiki. Add your reports when you are finished with your interviews.
Chicago
Columbia
Dartmouth / Tuck
Duke / Fuqua
Harvard
Kellogg
Michigan / Ross
MIT / Sloan
Stanford
UNC / Chapel Hill
Virginia / Darden
Wharton
London Business School

MBA Tipline

We encourage admissions officers, students and applicants to alert us of interesting news and developments, please send an email to news@clearadmit.com so we can blog it.

Program Rankings

Rankings are a good way to start your research on various MBA Programs. Keep in mind each uses a different methodology.
Business Week
Economist
Financial Times
Forbes
USNews
Wall Street Journal

B-School Resources

The following are business resources offered by a variety of leading Business Schools. It's useful to subscribe to these resources, especially for the schools to which you are applying.
knowledge@wharton
INSEAD Knowledge
Harvard Working Knowledge
Knowledge @ Emory
Columbia Ideas @ Work
knowledge@ W. P. Carey
Stanford Knowledgebase
Ross Thought in Action

MBA Programs: The Rest of the World

As there is some variety in the length of international MBA programs, we have denoted the length of the program next to its name (1 = one year; 2 = 2 years). If an MBA Program is not listed, please e-mail and we will be happy to list it.

Additional Resources

Archives

“D-day” for Duke

Today is the ‘Round 2′ notification date for the Duke/Fuqua MBA program. For relevant discussion with other Duke R2 applicants, check out the BW Thread: http://forums.businessweek.com/bw-bschools/messages?msg=50749.1

The Clear Admit team would like to congratulate all those admitted to the class of 2006! Your hard work has truly paid off! We would also like to offer our support to those of you who did not make the cut this time. We encourage you to keep in mind the following points:

1) If you absolutely must go to b-school this fall, there are many other top schools with late round deadlines forthcoming (see our posting from Tuesday for details). Given the shift in application volume, this may be one of the few years to . . . → Continue Reading

Wharton and Pearson (Financial Times, Penguin, etc.) Launch Wharton School Publishing

Interesting news. For details, check out the following: . . . → Continue Reading

Important Dates

While many of you are awaiting word on ’round 2′ applications, there seems to be some interest in the late deadlines this year (perhaps spurred on by the decrease in application volume and subsequent solicitation by the schools). Here is a quick guide to several important deadlines that are approaching:

Feb-27: London Business School
March-1: U. Michigan
March-1: Columbia (international applicants)
March-3: IESE
March-5: UNC and UC Berkeley
March-11: Harvard
March-12: Kellogg and Yale
March-15: NYU and Cornell
March-16: Stanford
March-18: Wharton
March-19: U. Chicago
March-22: Carnegie Mellon and Duke
March-24: Insead*
March-31: UVA

and in April, there are deadlines for Dartmouth, IMD and UCLA….(amongst others).

* Insead’s deadline is for their January . . . → Continue Reading

Feedback from our clients…

This is the time of year when clients send us their thoughts on the services we provide. One client recently sent us this email to Eliot Ingram (co-founder of Clear Admit):

—– Original Message —–
From:
To: eliot@clearadmit.com
Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2004 12:52 AM
Subject: testimonial

Dear Eliot,

I wanted to thank you for your help and write a testimonial that you can use (see below). I will not hesitate to recommend Clear Admit or serve as a reference.

“There is absolutely NO way I would have been accepted to three highly ranked business schools had I not used Clear Admit’s services. They not only helped me narrow down my list of schools, but were able to help me market myself in a consistent, unique, and competitive manner . . . → Continue Reading

Sample Interview Questions for HBS

Here are a handful of sample questions for those of you preparing for your ’round 2′ HBS interviews. These are taken from our database of HBS-specific questions, but they should be of use for anyone approaching an MBA interview.

Clear Admit’s HBS Interview Questions, Section 1: Leadership

1. Tell me about a recent leadership experience since submitting application (e.g. not in your essays).
2. Expand on the leadership essay #1.
3. Tell me about a leadership experience with a college activity and a community activity.
4. What is your leadership style? What qualities should a good leader possess?
5. What is your best leadership example?
6. What have you learned from good leaders? Who is your hero?
7. Have you ever had a bad manager? Why was he/she bad? What did you do . . . → Continue Reading

HBS interviews trickling out!

HBS has begun inviting ’round 2′ applicants for interviews. HBS’s ‘non-blind’ interview style is very different when compared to schools like Kellogg, Wharton or Stanford. As such, it requires careful preparation. Contact us for details and access to our HBS sample questions and interview . . . → Continue Reading

Wharton interview invitations, rejection letters

February 19th is the last day that Wharton will be releasing ’round 2′ interview invitations. They will also notify all ’round 2′ candidates who did not receive an invite to inform them that they have been denied admission to the school.

While tomorrow will undoubtedly be difficult for many applicants, the benefit of this early notification is that it gives candidates a chance to regroup and assess their profile/positioning strategy prior to the ’round 3′ deadlines for other schools. In many cases, this ‘early feedback’ from Wharton can serve as a turning point – enabling an applicant to have a greater impact in the late rounds (or as . . . → Continue Reading

Schools soliciting ‘Round 3′ applications?

A few Clear Admit clients have alerted us to an interesting phenomenon of late. A handful of top-15 schools are actually emailing candidates to encourage late season applications (Columbia, Tuck and Fuqua are the names that have come up most frequently). As we have reported here over the past few months, many top schools are looking at substantial decreases in application volume (anywhere from 15-25%). Based on this, many admissions committees are still searching for highly qualified applicants to help ’round out’ their classes. As such, it still makes sense for solid applicants to consider late applications . . . → Continue Reading

Getting Ready for the Interview

Now that the ’round 2′ interview invites are being handed out, many of you are turning your attention towards preparing for your interview(s). Here are a handful of basic tips that should help you prepare:

1. Find out who conducts the interviews. If possible, you should always go into an interview with an understanding of who might be sitting opposite you. Will it be a second year MBA student? A seasoned admissions officer? The admissions director? A professor? An alum? In each of these cases, you might build a different approach. For example, an alumni interview might be fairly casual – over a lunch meeting or coffee – whereas a sit-down with the admissions director on the MBA campus should have a . . . → Continue Reading

Background Checks

As some of you may know, many of the top MBA programs engage in a verification/fact-checking process for those candidates they admit. This involves finding out whether the applicant worked where they claim to have worked, earned the salary they listed in their application, received recommendations from the people cited on the application forms (rather than making them up), etc.

The purpose of this exercise is to protect all stakeholders of the MBA program (students, faculty, staff, alumi) from those who would seek to falsify their background and pervert the admissions process. It goes without saying that background checks are a good idea, yet there have been varying levels of protest from applicants on the Business Week b-school discussion boards.

In particular, . . . → Continue Reading

How we’re doing…

Clear Admit clients continually update us with their results in the MBA admissions process. Now that the first round of MBA admissions is rapidly disappearing in the rear-view mirror, here’s a partial listing of the schools that our clients have been admitted to thus far:

Berkeley/Haas, Cambridge/Judge, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth/Tuck, Duke/Fuqua, Emory, Harvard, HEC, IESE, Insead, Kellogg/Northwestern, London Business School, Michigan, MIT, NYU/Stern, Oxford/Said, Rotman, Stanford, UCLA, UNC, USC, UVA/Darden, Wharton, Yale SOM.

Once again, we’re having a strong showing across the board. We’ll be adding to this list as we get more news from . . . → Continue Reading