The Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) interview is widely regarded as one of the most personal, and most challenging, interviews in the MBA admissions process. Unlike more traditional forms of admissions interviews, Stanford’s is deeply behavioral, highly introspective, and designed to assess not just what you have done but also how you think, reflect, and connect.
The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania uses a very different interview format than most business schools do, opting for a virtual in place of a traditional admissions interview to evaluate its candidates.
In this post, we explain what you can expect in the Wharton TBD and how best to prepare for this one-of-a-kind interview.
Maybe you are one of the unlucky applicants on the outside looking in this year, shaking your head and struggling to understand why you were not accepted to your target MBA program. As you look back and assess where things might have gone wrong, you could end up focusing unduly on your MBA interviews. After all, you were invited to interview but were rejected thereafter, so there must be a cause-and-effect relationship, right? Your rejection must mean that everything was at stake during those 30 to 60 minutes and that your interviewer just did not feel that you are of the caliber preferred by your target school, right? Not at all.
“What are your goals, and why do you need an MBA from our school?” Virtually all MBA programs ask some version of this question, and the resulting essay is referred to as a “personal statement.” You must answer this question thoughtfully and with detail. So, what should you write to achieve this?
The Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation, a grueling, three-part financial program that hundreds of thousands of people pursue each year covers many of the subjects included in a typical first-year MBA curriculum. A CFA aspirant must study basic economics, accounting, finance, and quantitative analysis areas that echo aspects of many first-year MBA core curricula. So, could working toward the CFA designation negatively affect an MBA applicant’s candidacy by suggesting that they already have the tools an MBA education would provide and that additional studies would therefore be superfluous? Definitely not!
A first-of-its-kind, on-demand MBA application experience that delivers a personalized curriculum for you and leverages interactive tools to guide you through the entire MBA application process.
Click here for the 2025–2026 MBA Essay Tips
