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Interview with Debanjan Dey

1. General Background Questions
2. Questions related to Pre-MBA Preparation
3. Questions related to Group Discussion
4. Questions related to Personal Interview
5. Questions related to CAT 2009 Paper
6. Questions related to Your Future Plans

Questions related to Personal Interview

Question: How did you prepare for the interview?
Answer: PT Education's Boot-camp (SureShot) helped me a lot in my interview preparation as the feedback was very helpful. Since I had a number of informal interactions with faculty, I was able to concentrate on the topics that I was lacking in. My interview preparation further consisted of revising curriculum subjects, general knowledge and reading up matter pertaining to my hobbies.

Question: How many interview calls did you get and from which institutes? How many and which ones of these could you actually convert to a Final Call?
Answer: I received calls from 6 IIMs - A, B, C, I, K, L. I have appeared in 5 interviews so far and results will be declared in the upcoming months. Only GD/PI of IIM Indore is still remaining.

Personal Interview Experience

Questions asked were related to -

IIM A - Academics (Computer Science - DBMS), hobbies (poetry and tabla) and GK
IIM B - Reading interests, discussion on hacking, interest in MBA
IIM I - Academics, hobbies and GK
IIM K - Sorting algorithms, maths, hobbies
IIM L - Hobbies (table tennis), processor chips, discussion on laptops

Question: How many Interviewers in each interview so far?
Answer: There were two members in each interview panel. The interview panelists were the same as those who had moderated the group discussions.

Interviews were 10-20 minutes long. Generally the process began with one interviewer quizzing me on academics (Computer Science related), followed by the other who asked me details regarding my extra-curricular activities. In IIM Kozhikode and IIM Lucknow interviews, I was asked to introduce myself first. Management related questions were not asked, except at IIM Bangalore where I was told to explain my interest in this line, and whether I considered my lack of work experience to be a handicap.

Overall, I found that if the academics related questions were handled well, one could lead the interview from then on, because the panelists asked you questions based on your previous responses. For instance, one of my college-mates was asked a question related to round robin algorithms in Operating Systems. Though he had not covered that subject in his curriculum, he mentioned that he knew the meaning of round robin in terms of football tournaments; thus, taking the interview on to his hobby, football.

General knowledge was also important and a number of questions were asked regarding West Bengal (my mother tongue is Bengali) and my school. So I had to go well-prepared with respect to my hobbies and background.

My interviews were pretty relaxed and there was usually not much grilling. At IIM Kozhikode, they first discussed the GD for some time because it had been rather unstructured. Also, at IIM Lucknow, although few questions were asked, I was grilled on each for quite some time. I consider IIM Bangalore and IIM Kozhikode to have been my best interview experiences since the discussion with the panelists proceeded on a very smooth note. An area where I could have improved included current affairs related to my hobbies, as I missed out on a few questions in this field.

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