The interview day - part II

Sometime ago I wrote about my thoughts on my interview day and you can find a description of the whole day here (http://mycambridgemba.blogspot.com/2007/03/interview-day.html).

I receive many emails asking me about the interview so let me dwell on it a bit more and give you my take on it. 

Receiving an interview invitation is a great milestone in your application process so if you got that nice letter you should feel confident. I think that’s actually the hardest bit. If you were invited it means you have the profile they are looking for. At the same time they are not going to invite you if they have many doubts about you. I’d say your chances at this point are looking pretty good! 

The interview day is not meant to be a torture. In my view it has two main objectives: put a name and a personality to the application and sell you the Cambridge brand. 

Starting with the latter, you have to remember this is a two way process. Cambridge wants to best candidates and the best candidates are likely get offers from many places. In order to beat the competition for the best talent, the interview day is set up to allow you to meet the staff, future colleagues, the facilities and the city. I would advise everyone to attend that day and not just do it over the phone. It really gives you a good taste of how that year is going to look like.

The other objective is to get to know you better and see if you are the person who prepared that application. Remember that many candidates get help from professional services in order to create the best possible application. Like for any interview, you should prepare well but let me tell you that you are not in for a grilling session. Some questions may be challenging but the idea is just to get to know you, assess your personality and ambitions and whether there’s any mismatch between you and the application you submitted.

So my advice is be honest, relax and really enjoy it! 

The gift of boundary-less friendship

Spending a whole year of your life inside a pressure cooker with 149 other individuals is a challenge, no doubt about that. However by the end of the process you’ll have such strong bonds with those people that you can be certain you’ll have friends for life. This is one of the gifts the MBA gave me and anyone who goes through such a programme knows what I’m talking about.

These are special friends. They are different in nature from the ones I had before. They are scattered all over the world and I don’t talk to them on a daily basis. In spite of distance or irregular contact the interesting part is that whenever we get together it is like time froze. It’s like we are back to the Cambridge times. It’s like we never left.

That is an invaluable gift and the pictures show what happens when we get together three years after the end of the programme in some (not so) random part of the world.

The location changing paradox: when two MBAs can be too much

Generally speaking, I think most would agree that it is easier for someone with an MBA to change job-location than it is for a non-MBA. However, for an MBA-couple it can be a lot harder to change job-location than it is for a non-MBA couple. This sounds counter intuitive but from my experience this is how it works:

Assuming a couple wants to change location (without a predefined location in mind) they would change it as soon as the first person finds a new job. The second person would follow and try to get a job at a later stage.

Now consider an MBA/non-MBA couple – in this case, it tends work like it does for a single person with an MBA. The rational approach is for the MBA-person to try to find a well paid job in a different location and as soon as he/she finds it, they move to a new location. The non-MBA-person will follow, giving up his/hers job and will try to get a job once they are in the new location. It seems to make sense to have the better-paid person leading the way and the opportunity cost of losing the non-MBA person’s salary might even be partly or fully compensated by an increase in pay of the MBA-person or in the quality of life. I’ve seen this happening many times when the couple just wants to change location or when the MBA person goes for an assignment in a different country with the same company.

But what happens with an MBA-couple? Something a little bit different. In this case, I assume both have a comparable and high salary. Following the same reasoning, they start searching and they plan on moving as soon as the first one finds a job. In a tough economy, chances are one will find it before the other does. Now add that to the fact each individual salary is high, so giving up any of the salaries implies a significant dent in the household income. Even with a pay rise of 20% for one the parties, the household dent will be significant. Depending on the risk aversion profile of the couple (and the job market dynamics of the chosen location), the opportunity cost of moving can easily be too high preventing them from moving, even if both were not fulfilled with their original jobs.

Isn’t it ironic that one MBA could make us perfectly mobile (and I posted about that before here), but if you put two MBAs together it might be the perfect combination for getting stuck in the same place?

PS: I know this is a simplification of the world and I know I’m making a few assumptions regarding differences in MBA/Non MBA salaries that are not always true. The truth is I see this happening more often than not.