Practice makes it perfect

Updated on: Monday, December 28, 2009

Watching the beautiful IIM-Bangalore campus in the Aamir Khan-starrer “3 Idiots” might have renewed the enthusiasm among CAT aspirants to enter the portals of IIMs.

Most students tend to relax once the written part of the examination is over and assume that they can prepare for the next round (Group Discussion/Personal Interview) after the results are out. But, this strategy could be fraught with danger.

The time between the announcement of the results and the commencement of the interviews — less than a month — is too little to make a significant impact on the preparation.

Preparing for the personal interview involves a lot of introspection and requires time. Although it does not require the 10-hour-a-day preparation like the CAT, you should aim to spend at least two to three hours a day for the next two months. There are two aspects to preparing for the personal interview: learning how to behave and preparing for the content of the interview.

Behaviour

You should train yourself to behave in a formal manner throughout the interview. This training can be obtained by participating in mock interviews conducted by professionals. You can also practice by requesting your friends, family or other aspirants to conduct mock interviews.

Although most interviews tend to be stressful, some of them (called ‘stress interviews') dial up the stress and aim at getting the candidate as flustered as possible. The focus should be on remaining calm through the most stressful of situations.

Personal questions

You should prepare a long list of potential questions that can be asked on your background and write down the answers for them. Why did you make the career choices you did, why do you want to do an MBA, why do you prefer the particular college for which you are being interviewed, what do you intend to do with the MBA degree are questions that will almost certainly be asked.

Another very common question is: tell us about yourself. Answers to this question should focus on talking about yourself (at least for a minute) highlighting aspects of your career, education, interests or extra/co-curricular activities which might not have been highlighted in the application form. If any hobbies or interests were mentioned in the application form, you should be prepared to answer a lot of question on that area.

Other questions

You should be prepared to answer questions on any aspect of your education and work (if applicable). As it is not possible to revise what was learnt in the last three or four years you should focus on revising basic concepts and brushing up on courses in which you performed well. In case the interviewer asks questions on subjects you are not confident about, you can always steer the questions to the area you prepared well on.

Preparation for the general questions can be covered by reading magazines and newspapers regularly. One thing that you should remember though is that it is always better to tell the interviewer that you do not know the answer rather than try to bluff your way through it. The interviewer almost certainly will know more than you, whatever the question may be.

Practice makes it perfect

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