Consulting
- What background do you have that would be helpful in consulting?
- Why consulting?
- How do you think the consulting industry is structured?
- What are some differences among the consulting firms that are important to you?
- What were the sales of your last employer? What was its profitability?
- Are you a generalist or specialist? Where do you see yourself specializing?
- Are you competitive?
- How are you going to make your decision if you get more than one offer?
Health Care
- Why are you interested in the health care industry?
- Why are you pursuing an MBA vs. Master in Health Administration?
- What strengths do you have for the health care industry?
- Prioritize the most important issues facing health care management.
- Provide your recommendations to address these issues.
- What is the current administration’s goal towards health care?
- Why have some HMOs been successful and others have not? Elaborate.
Investment Banking
- What would you do if you weren’t going into investment banking?
- What was your quantitative GMAT score?
- Some technical finance/accounting questions:
- How do you value a firm?
- What is an interest rate swap?
- What is DCF? How do you calculate the discount rate?
- How do you determine if a stock is undervalued?
- How would you price the stock for an IPO?
- What is the yield on a zero coupon bond trading at par with 10 years to maturity?
- What is working capital? Quick ratio? Free cash flow?
- Tell me what you know about [the firm].
- Tell me about the cultures of the different firms.
- How are you going to make your decision if you get more than one offer?
- What do you want to do and why - M&A, capital markets, or corporate finance?
- The bond market is going down; what is the stock market going to do?
- Where is the industry going? What is the market doing?
- What are the headlines in today’s Wall Street Journal?
- What do you read regularly on the industry?
- Why choose investment banking? Why pick this bank?
- Tell me what an investment banker does.
- Tell me the difference between commercial and investment banks.
- Why pick corporate finance as opposed to sales and trading?
- What are your outside activities? Why would you be willing to give them up for such a demanding job?
- What role do you play in group situations?
- What would you do if offered drugs as part of the deal? (or other ethically-oriented questions)
- Sell us on your quantitative skills.
- How smart are you? How do we know how smart you are?
- If we made you an offer today, would you take it?
- What did the Dow, S&P, or NASDAQ close at yesterday?
- What stocks do you follow and why? (Be prepared to discuss the stock’s performance.)
Marketing
- Give me the attributes of a good brand manager.
- Now take me through your background and demonstrate how you have each attribute.
- Rate Yale’s marketing program.
- How would you sell more [Tide]?
- Talk about an ad—what makes it effective? interesting? etc.
- What are some examples of bad advertising? Why?
- How do you sell your ideas?
- What are you looking for in a consumer products company?
- What do you think are the most important traits in a marketing person?
- Describe your leadership style.
- Provide an example of your problem solving approach.
Sales and Trading
- What other firms have you talked to?
- What makes you think you can sell?
- Would you like to do sales or trading? Why?
- Tell me what you think a trader (salesperson) does.
- Why choose selling debt vs. selling equity?
- Why didn’t you choose corporate finance?
- What do you think having an MBA does for you in this field?
- What particular markets or instruments are you interested in? Why?
- Will your personality make you a good trader? Why?
- How will you motivate yourself to make the calls you hate to make?
- What are your grades? (Yes, they know about the Yale SOM grading process.)
Strategic Planning and Corporate Finance
- What do you hope to gain by working for our firm?
- Where do you see yourself five years from now?
- How do you see your career progressing in our firm?
- What do you know about our industry?
- How would you describe our competitive position?
- Our ____ division is thinking of introducing a (such and such) new product. How would you go about determining if this is a good idea? We are having trouble managing our ____ division. What do you think are the key performance metrics? How would you improve them?
- How would you value our _____ for a potential sale, spin-off, or liquidation?
- How does M&A activity in banking affect our industry?
Venture Capital
- What is venture capital?
- What strengths do you have for venture capital?
- Tell me when you have worked with all management levels--from CEO to analyst.
- Describe your analytical and interpersonal skills.
- What operations exposure have you had?
- What managerial exposure have you had?
- What do you look for in a venture?
- Do you think more effort should be put into human capital or raising funds and investing them?