R1 Update and LBS Interview Details

Unexpected but welcome results

To be completely honest I’m surprised how well R1 has gone for me. Not to humble brag but so far I have received interview invites to 4 out of the 5 schools I’ve applied to, all scheduled over the coming weeks

• London Business School : Alumni Interview
• Darmouth Tuck :  On Campus (See my other post)
• Yale SOM: Skype Interview
• Berkeley Haas: Alumni Interview
• Duke Fuqua: Nov 8 release date.

Being below the GMAT average for pretty much all schools I’ve applied to, receiving these interview invites has been a great feeling. It seems school are at least somewhat interested in me and my story.

The last of the interview invites to come in was from Haas, which was the one I least expected.  Haas acceptance rate is about 12% which is around the same as MIT Sloan and Harvard and only properly beaten by Stanford GSB at a grueling  6%. Haas admits about 50% of people that they interview so at this point it looks like  I have a 1/2 chance of getting into Haas.

LBS and the non blind interview

From what I understand so far, all school interviews will be blind. Meaning that the interviewer only has access to my resume. One school that does not follow this process is LBS. My understanding is that the  LBS  alumnus has access to my full application, including essays, transcript and resume etc.  I’m not sure how this changes things, if at all, but I am curious to see if there is any difference based on this information.

LBS and the video interview

In addition to an Alumni interview, LBS also asks applicants to do a recorded interview with 2 questions – one known question and one unknown question.

“As part of the video component, we will ask you to answer two video questions, one of which will be:

1)      What will you gain from the London Business School MBA Programme that you won’t gain from another MBA programme?”

As mentioned in another post, I really dislike video interviews but nonetheless, they are a necessary component of the application process.  I’ve been delaying this video interview and now just have one week left to complete it. Time to start preparing I guess .