Saturday, 8AM, BVB, Race Course Road. I was part of the first Bangalore GD/PI batch of Great Lakes Institute of management, chennai for the year. Reached there at 7 AM (Yes, I make it a point to be much earlier than necessary as I hate the concept of IST – Indian Stretchable Time ). And the security guys were not even UP!! Anyway, ppl started trickling in by 7:30 AM. And caught the first sight of a GLIM student by around 7:45AM. I don’t know his name, but I had met him when he had come to Bangalore for the GLIM tour in September, 2007. He soon led us to the waiting area where our GMAT/CAT scores were validated.
The whole process, according to me, went very smoothly and to my surprise, got over in just over 2 hours. This was very pleasantly different from other interviews I have faced and I have to give a Thumbs Up to the organisers and students from the current batch who came for the process. Very well executed and done. In most other institutes, it normally takes an entire day and would amount to a logistics nightmare. That dint happen here (At least not for my slot, not sure about the rest) Only negative I saw in the process was that none of the organisers thought of introducing themselves and putting the candidates at rest about the entire process. Apart from this, all went like clock work.
There were around 17 ppl in the 8Am batch. We were split into 2 groups. I was the first one in group A. Both an advantage and a disadvantage in my opinion. Advantage coz my interview was scheduled as soon as I came back from my GD. Disadvantage coz I (and no: 10 in the Group) was sitting the closest to the GD evaluators (rectangular table, evaluators at one head of the table) and also coz I had to crane my neck to get a view of most ppl in the discussion.
My case based GD topic was “Mr Y is a small hotel owner who caters to the middle class providing good local food and low prices. 2 new hotels come up in your vicinity, also aimed at the middle/upper middle class. The new hotels are multi cuisine and offer online ordering of food for specific time etc. but Mr Y does not want to get into all these gimiks. What marketing should he do in order to survive?” The GD was OK... Not too much of fish market, though there were very strong ppl there. GD was for 15 mins, but we were asked to conclude much earlier. (Maybe the evaluators felt we weren’t doing justice to the topic). When we were asked to conclude, we got into another round of discussions!! Over all I was not too happy with it.
After the GD, we has the personality profiling test. 24 sets of 4 words, choose the words that most (M) and Least (L) describe you. 7 mins. This is one area where you should NOT (yes, NOT) think. You need to mark the first thing that comes to your mind. Since the questions are related, if you try to fudge some answers to make you look “better” (again its debatable if a persons personality is better than someone else’s), it will be caught in some other qn and you will come out as not consistent. Keep in mind that there is NO right or wrong answers in this. It’s about your personality. And there is nothing right or wrong about that.
We were asked to return to the waiting area to wait for the “kill”. PI I mean. After about 10 mins I was led to be butchered, or so I thought. But, again I was surprised to find that my interview panel put me at rest. 2 ppl, one professor and one young chap (either an alumnus or a student). Again, they dint introduce themselves. After the usual pleasantries, the interview started.
1) Tell us about yourself, your work.
2) Why do you want to do your MBA
3) You have a good thing going on in you present work, why do u want to change it?
4) Why GLIM
5) If there are 3 things that you look for in GLIM, what would it be?
6) Why do u want to do 1 yr MBA and not 2yr? Obviously, 2yr is better right?
7) Your recommenders have mentioned that you do not like processes. How would u comment on that?
8 ) Why do you want to change to finance?
9) If you want to meet your targets at the end of the month, but say you want to be honest about selling financial products, how will that work out?
10) What are your hobbies?
11) What do u do when you don’t go on bike rides?
12) What’s the diff in your opinion about a wealth manager and HR manager? Both of them interact with ppl right?
13) If you are HR manager of a company and you have 3 body guards with you (??? I immediately asked if I really need to walk around with 3 body guards ), and you see some of the workers not working and simply wasting time, how would you deal with the situation.
I would have guessed the interview went on for about 20-25 mins. I do not know what to make of it really, I felt I did a pretty decent job, but that’s what I hear everyone say!!! When I returned to the waiting area, I was told I could leave.
So I guess it’s a 2-3 week wait for the results to be posted. Keeping fingers crossed in the time being
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