IIM Ahmedabad Interview Experiences

Candidate 1

Date: 11th February, Noon

Profile:

• Graduation: Chemical engineering
• Work experience: In battery RnD

Personal Interview

Panelists: 1 Male and 1 Female

Panelist 1

• What is chemical engineering?
• Explain your work experience
• Explain the whole process.
• What specifically is your role in this?

Extreme cross-questioning in each answer. They wanted to know how chemical engineering helped in each step.

Panelist 2

• Math- What is the Cartesian system of coordinates?
• Give an alternative to this.

Further discussion on this and wanted an in-depth answer. They also asked for examples. I had to inform them that I didn’t know the answer at the end.

Other questions

P2: What current affairs do you know?

A. I highlighted that the newspaper is all about the election, the conflicts going on and Bharat Ratna.

P2: What are your hobbies?

A. Chess

P2: I don't care about chess. Tell me what's going on in Pakistan politics.

A. Mentioned what I know about elections but I was not aware of the specifics.

P2: What about US elections?

A. I gave my views and who I think will win.

P2: Who won the Bharat Ratna and why?

A. There was further cross-questioning on this.

In the end, I was told to take a toffee and go.

Total time 20 -25 min

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Candidate 2

Time: Morning slot, 8:15 am

Profile

• Graduation: MBBS Graduated in August 2023
• Work experience: Fresher

Analytical Writing Test

Topic: Violence portrayal in movies good or bad (20 mins)

Personal Interview

Panelists: 2 Males (M1& M2)

M2: Why MBA?

M2: Enquired about COVID-19 and the issues that I saw during duty in 2021.

M1: You did NEET prep and govt. banned coaching for 16 years under. So do you think Kota should exist at a Philosophical level?

A. I discussed both sides of the argument and concluded with a NO because it means a failure of institutions & schools in Kota exists. Plus mental pressure, suicides, and destruction of childhood for 6-7 years are not valid and also online resources are available which are great.

They started to defend the stance for 10 minutes and continuously asked me if I was willing to change my view. I did not change my stance.

M1: Asked about my hobby.

A. Chess

M1: Don’t you think it’s just a memory and boring? How would you form a strategy in chess? Again cross questions on everything like why waste time? Why not just allow computers to play? (10mins)

M1: You know about the economy. Forget the numbers, pick one thing you would eliminate from India right now.

A. Thought for 10 seconds and answered HUNGER

M1: Cross question on whether it means you don't care for capex.

A. I defended my stance and talked about my rural hospital experience in my internship and what I saw. (5 mins)

Total: 35 mins

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Candidate 3

Location: Day 1 of IIM-A interviews @IIM Campus Vastrapur, morning slot.

Profile:

• GEM candidate
• Work experience: 2.5 years in the Investment Banking industry in the Quantitative Modelling space.

Analytical Writing Test

Topic: Critically analyze ethical and moral dilemmas around the release of films and series that depict extreme violence. How does it impact the crime rate in our societies? Give points for and against the topic.

Personal Interview

Disclaimer:

• The interview lasted for 50 minutes and was highly grilling in nature.
• My advice is to practice meditation/deep breathing/nerve-calming techniques, it’ll help you a lot more than last-minute revision before the interview.
• The professors may cut you mid-sentence and argue aggressively, do not get scared.
• On the subjective questions, the professors played Devil’s Advocate and negated everything that I said just to see how I defended my stance and how I held up under pressure.
• Try to smile and maintain a positive body posture throughout the interview.
• The first half of my interview was highly targeted towards my work experience and I believe that an average candidate is expected to only know some of these things. I had a Finance professor on my panel whose work aligns with my current job, hence the depth of his questions. The other professor was from a Policy Making background.
• Although I present a list of questions below, the interview format was not Question-Answer, each topic was discussed in detail to gauge my depth and not just the memorized concepts. Each answer leads to a detailed discussion which in turn leads to the next set of questions. Your concepts should be sound and you should have a certain clarity of thought.

Interview Questions

1. Tell us about your school. (My school happens to be right across the road from IIM Ahmedabad)
2. Tell us about yourself
3. What exactly do you do in an Investment Bank?
4. You already work in Finance, so why an MBA?
5. What are client-facing roles in the world of Finance?
6. What aspects of financial modeling do you cover?
7. What is risk in Finance?
8. What is counterparty credit risk? What are the various methods to calculate CCR?
9. What is market risk? Name a few methods to calculate market risk.
10. What are financial regulators and what do they do? Name a few financial regulators. What is Basel?
11. What is the Internal Model Method and how does it differ from the standardized approach to calculating counterparty credit risk? Why do banks prefer IMM?
12. What is option pricing and what models do you use to price them?
13. Write the Black-Scholes equation.
14. Explain the concepts behind arriving at this equation.
15. What is a Wiener process?
16. Write the equation for a Brownian Motion.
17. Explain Brownian Motion as an engineer, and use concepts of fluid mechanics.
18. What is VaR? Explain it to me as if I am a layman.
19. What are the various methods to calculate VaR?
20. What is the expected shortfall and how do you calculate it?
21. What is a normal distribution? Draw the curve.
22. What do the x and y axes represent in a normal curve?
23. Why do you assume stock returns series to be normally distributed?
24. Explain stock path movements using a graph.
25. What is the Law of Large Numbers? What is the Central Limit Theorem? How do you define “large” for such theorems?
26. What is a confidence interval?
27. What are type-1 and type-2 errors? Which type of error is more risky?
28. What does your bank do to minimize these errors?
29. Give a real-life example of a normal distribution.
30. What is probability and what is uncertainty? Explain the difference between them with examples.
31. What is a binomial distribution?
32. Write the equation for a binomial distribution.
33. How would you explain probability to a 5-year-old?
34. What if he tosses a coin 20 times and gets heads all 20 times? How would you explain it to him then?
35. What are regression models?
36. Use all these discussed concepts to explain how any Investment Bank uses financial modeling to calculate risk.
37. Why did you do engineering if you wanted to make a career in finance?
38. How does being an Engineer help you in your current job?
39. Why does the country waste resources on people like you to make you engineers when you provide no engineering assets to the country?
40. What needs to change so that people start taking up diverse fields at the undergraduate level? What would you change in your school?
41. What were the key highlight points of the NEP 2020?
42. You run a page related to Cinema on Instagram and sell it to us like a pitch.
43. How much time do you invest in it and what do you gain out of it?
44. What steps would you take to build your page into a business?
45. If you’re presented with a situation where you can no longer sustain working on the page, what would you do?
46. What is the opportunity cost for which you’d give up on your page? Quantify it.
47. Thoughts on the Statue of Unity. Should it have been constructed?
48. What are the costs and benefits of such a construction? Do the costs of the Statue of Unity outweigh the benefits?
49. What is capital expenditure? What are the other types of expenditures?
50. How could the Government have worked for the upliftment of the villages around the statue without constructing the statue? State methods to do this without any capital investments.
51. Do you think that the villagers do not know business and they need the government to construct extravagant statues to give them employment?
52. How does a villager hedge his risk? How do they insure themselves against losses?
53. What are the intangible benefits of such a construction? How would you quantify the intangible benefits?

Please have a toffee.

Postscript -

Again, you may know the answers to the above-mentioned questions but the textbook definition would not do. They are going to dig deep into what you say. All the best for your interview!

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Candidate 4

Profile

• Graduation: BA Sociology
• Work Experience: Fresher

Analytical Writing Test

Topic: How AI will potentially replace the role of a manager? Give points for or against the topic.

Personal Interview

There were 2 panelists.

Disclaimer:

• The interview lasted for 25-30 minutes and was highly grilling in nature.
• Practicing meditation, deep breathing, or nerve-calming techniques can provide greater benefits than relying on last-minute revision before your interview.
• A lot of questions were asked in my dissertation. These inquiries covered core aspects of my knowledge, indicating the depth and breadth of the topic under discussion.
• The main focus was on what we studied in our undergraduate programs. Most of the questions were related to this area.

Interview Questions

1. What did you study in Sociology?
2. What was Karl Marx like as a person?
3. What was Marx’s relationship with Engels and what does it signify?
4. What is Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”?
5. Did you have Philosophy as a subject?
6. What else did you study in Sociology?
7. What is feminism? (Many follow-up questions along with this one)
8. Do you have an interest in the sciences?
9. How would you define a scientific temperament?
10. How would you distinguish a musician with a scientific temperament from the one who doesn't?
11. Explain the sociology of science and technology?
12. Provide two reasons why we shouldn’t select you?
13. From a sociological perspective, explain why all candidates participating in the IIM A interview have chosen to wear masculine attire?
14. Define the “Us vs Them” bias and how it relates to sociological theory?

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