Cat Interview Tips

The reality is that the Personality Assessment stage is the most difficult part of the selection process. While the number of students you will be competing against is fewer, the quality of competition is higher. Each student who is short listed by the institute deserves to be in the final list, but only those who are well prepared will finally make it. This stage is difficult because its focus is on those aspects that have been ignored by most of us as they were never part of our school and college exams.

The questions asked in the interview are very simple but the answer requires deeper introspection. Also, unfortunately, there is no specific way of answering these questions and worse each one of us will have a different answer. Some of the commonly asked questions in the interview are:

Tell me something about yourself

What are your strengths and weakness?

Which is your biggest achievement in life so far?

Why do you want to do an MBA?

Which is your favourite subject?

Are you satisfied with your academic performance?

The answer to each of the above question will come only after deep introspection of self which unfortunately requires time and cannot be left for the 2-4 weeks between the call letter and the actual interview.

In addition to the interview many institutes have other evaluation tools or activities like group discussion, case study, group task, extempore, etc. which many of you have never been a part of. Hence, you need time to understand these tools and practice them. This is where MBA aspirants with work experience have an advantage over college students. Those of you with work experience would have been exposed to some of these evaluation tools during your recruitment process but may still need to understand its intricacies and will most probably need practice.

If you think that this stage is all about personal attributes and ability to speak and you can afford to ignore your academics/job, you are mistaken. This stage also evaluates you on what you gained in college, your job and your knowledge of the environment (general awareness).

So along with your SNAP and XAT preparation, you should start preparing for personality assessment as well.

How to prepare?

While many of you would already be enrolled in a program that will prepare you for this stage, unfortunately for many of you the preparatory classes for personality assessment will start only after 10th Jan 2013. The onus of utilizing the next 40 days productively is entirely upon you. So let us see what all you need to do in these 40 days to ensure that you are not caught unaware when you receive your interview call letter. You need to work on the following three broad areas:

Academics and/or Work

General Awareness

Self-awareness

Academics / Work:

This is the area from which questions are invariably asked to all students. In terms of preparation this is the easiest - all you need to do is study. Prepare a couple of subjects from your final year and brush up the fundamentals of the key subjects. You should also revise your summer internship report, term papers or any project that you may have done as part of your academic program.

In case you are working, you need to have not only complete understanding of your work but