The MIT Sloan Interview

If you’ve been invited to interview at MIT Sloan’s MBA program, congratulations! As you prepare for your interview and begin to write your interview essays, we’d like to share some information we hope will be helpful to you.

The Interview

The interview will be virtual again this year, and you’ll need to pay special attention to how you position yourself to optimize your ability to establish rapport with your interviewer. Unlike most other admissions interviews, the MIT Admissions Committee will have read your entire application and will ask behavioral questions that focus on past actions rather than hypothetical what-ifs. Sloan’s official guidance on its interviews notes that the Admissions Committee will be looking for examples of some of these traits:

• Influencing others: the ability to influence a person, group, or organization.
• Relationship building: the ability to build and maintain professional relationships.
• Drive: the ability to set an objective and achieve it.

The Interview Essays

You’ve been given two prompts to write on and submit prior to your interview: one that addresses diversity and inclusion; the other focused on data-driven decisions you’ve made. If you’re struggling with the two essays, Admitify would like to share some tips with you:

• Remember that, broadly speaking, these essays evaluate your people/EQ skills and your data analysis skills – both essential to professional success today.
• When preparing to write about Diversity & Inclusion, consider that D&I is an increasingly vital factor in business school admissions because it is an increasingly vital factor in corporate human resources.
• Organizations expect MBAs to not only be comfortable and effective in diverse work environments, but able to contribute to building them.
• You’re given a choice between 2 data-oriented questions to write on: one around an existing data visualization and why it matters to you, the other describing a recent data-driven decision you had to make.
• Choose the prompt that will let you shine best. If a non-business scenario (current events, community, personal) will let you show your data analysis chops better than any analyses you’ve done in your career (perhaps because it’s not interesting or wasn’t successful or is too complex or is confidential), choose Prompt 1.

If you’d like more personalized help with your interview essays and prep, our expert coaches are available to work with you by the hour ($299) and we have no minimum hourly limit.  Contact the Admitify team now!