The interview was at a coffee shop and revolved around a few basic questions. It was a blind interview, although I provided my resume in advance, and it lasted 45 minutes. I had the opportunity to ask questions throughout the conversation.
1. Walk me through the last three years of your resume.
2. Why are you interested in going to business school?
3. What specific courses are you interested in?
4. Have you visited campus? Why Columbia? Why NYC?
5. What are your near-term career goals? Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
6. What else would you like me to tell the admissions committee?
Thirty-one teams of Columbia University alumni have been selected as the first-ever winners of the Columbia Startup Lab contest and will occupy newly renovated office space in the heart of New York City’s Silicon Alley, the school announced earlier this week.
The teams, totaling 63 people, were chosen from more than 200 submissions by recently graduated alumni from each Columbia College, Columbia Business School, Columbia Engineering and the School of International and Public Affairs. As part of the Startup Lab, the entrepreneurs will benefit from discounted office space ($150 a month per desk) and business infrastructure, as well as support from each of the affiliate schools and Columbia Entrepreneurship, a new organization that resides in the President’s Office with close partnership from the University Office of Alumni Relations and Development. Continue reading…

Welcome to this week’s Tell Us Tuesday, where we highlight MBA interview reports that have recently been posted to our Interview Archive. Over the past few weeks, we have received interview reports from a variety of schools, including ! The following is a recent excerpt from a Round 2 Wharton applicant’s experience of the team-based discussion submitted this past week:
“We were read the prompt, told our time constraint, and then asked to start. Everyone shared their idea, and then I summarized the key deliverables we were trying to work towards and offered to play the role of timekeeper and offered a general structure for how the time should go. We settled very quickly on our topic, and then spent some time discussing the method of delivery. I think that we did a really good job of incorporating each other’s ideas, and building off everyone. My key role was to try and place some of the more divergent ideas into a larger framework, ask clarifying questions, and then synthesize.”