This blog series covers the types of questions you can expect to receive in your MBA interview.
“Tell me about a time when…”
Throughout your MBA interview, we encourage you to share anecdotes whenever possible. But there are some questions that you MUST answer with a story. These are "SAR responses" because you'll describe the situation (20% of the response), the action you took, and the result (collectively 80% of the response). Some SAR prompts will be familiar because they are commonly used in interviews. You may have also used some of these anecdotes in your essay responses. Go right ahead and reuse any applicable application content. Those were your experiences and your takeaways, after all. There's no need to invent a whole new self.
Consider how you would respond to prompts like these:
Describe a failure and what you learned from it.
Tell me about a time when you challenged the group consensus.
Tell me about a time when you took on a leadership role.
Tell me about an experience when you learned from people different from yourself.
Tell me about a time when you developed an imaginative solution to a problem.