MSBA 申請準備 Part4_面試準備
By: Emily Chen
Tags: Business Analysis, Msba, Interview

MSBA preparation_interview process

▲為了面試還去IKEA買了電腦架，把電腦架高，臉才顯得小點

2018年10月初從第一輪的學校開始投遞，有些學校還要錄影片，有些則要你回答一些behavior questions，一直申請到11月，這些學校幾乎都沒有什麼結果，當時也想可能是沒有希望，因為如果有，應該也要收到線上面試通知了，所以11月初抱著沒多大的希望投了SMU MSBA，沒想到這間學校效率超高，隔天就收到系主任的來信，希望安排面試，心裡一陣著急，想著要是這所學校沒有錄取，可能就要投第二輪的學校了。

面試幾乎全靠追夢網Chase Dream(簡稱CD)上網友分享的面試經典(簡稱面筋，面試時教授問的問題)來準備，搜尋了過往學長姐以及這屆同申同學寫過的面試過程，把所有問題整理成一個WORD檔，接著花了一個禮拜的時間把所有問題打好並背下來，還請老爸在台中開SKYPE假扮成教授，我在台北跟他練習面試XD

面試準備的題目以及回答如下：

1. Please tell me your Chinese name and English name

Hi, My Chinese name is Yen Jung, Chen, and I would prefer others to call me Emily, Chen.

2. Why SMU?

The reason for me to choose Southern Methodologist University for graduate study is because SMU located in States of Texas, Dallas, which has the joint-highest number of Fortune 500 company headquarters in the United States. This is a great place to seek for job opportunities after finishing the graduate study. Furthermore, SMU offers a number of clubs or organizations. I’m strongly interested in Finance Association since my short term goal is to seek for the financial analyst jobs, and the finance association provides all kinds of resources, like speaker events, firms visit, which I can gain insight about the financial industry.

3. Why Cox?

SMU Cox school of business is the small class size. I can build a strong relationship with classmates and professors. Also, the Cox Community has alumni all over the world, which I can get professional advice or networking opportunity after the graduate study.

4. Why MSBA?

There are two reasons that I choose COX MSBA as my graduate study. The first one is the experience of working as intern in CTBC bank. I was assigned to analyze the blockchain technology, which is about how the bank industry responded to blockchain technology. I found that blockchain only reduce the time of cash flow, it does not reduce the information flow, since many regulations are applied to the bank industry, so this motivate me to study about Decision Model, which I can realize how banks create model to avoid risk and uncertainties. The second reason is because my family is starting a 3D printing company, they want to analyze customers’ behavior, increase brand awareness and provide the best products for them at the best time. So I would like to use data to provide useful information for my family’s business by participating the Customer Insights and Market Intelligence class.

5. Why do you choose analytics as your graduate study?

Well, the reason for me to choose Analytics as my graduate study mainly comes from the experience of participate in the program trading class, where I realized how to use R programming language to build a trading strategy, back testing the strategy, and to analyze the stock performance. After the class, I found that stock trading is not just build a perfect trading model, it is to develop a code that would avoid lose. This is why I want to learn more about the hedging strategy and how to analyze big amount of data by statistical tools.

6. Will you choose to stay or return to your hometown after graduate? What is future plan?

After graduate, if I have a chance, I will choose to say at the U.S. and find jobs related to financial analyst. That is because my short term goal is to become an analyst in the financial industry, and bring the knowledge that I learned from the graduate study to the workplace,After 3 or 4 years of work, I will return to my hometown and choose to work in the media company, where I can analyze big amount of data set and use the data visualization technique to present accurate data to readers.

7. What is your career goal?

My career goal would separate into three stages. The short term goal is to become an analyst in the financial industry, to improve the financial service experience and to increase the working efficiency in money transferring. Midterm goal would be to become an analyst in the media company, where I can combine my writing ability and data visualization ability to present easy understanding graphics to readers. The long term goal is to help my family’s business, to increase brand awareness and enhance sales by implementing the marketing strategy and digital business strategy to my family’s business.

8. Please tell me a failed experience.

An unforgettable failed experience happened at the time when I was applying for an internship that is opened by JP Morgan, the internship position is the JAVA engineer intern. I knew that I am not well qualified for the position since my coding experience is not strong enough to solve difficult problems. Although I put so much effort on preparing for the position, I still failed at answering the technical problems that the interviewer gave me, and also failed to wrote out the correct answer on the online JAVA test. After this experience, I knew that I should go on practicing the code and knew that my interest may not be on writing the code, but more on analyzing data.

9. Please tell me an experience of presenting in front of the class in English.

Well, I do not have that much experience of presenting in front of the class in English, since my native language is Mandarin Chinese, but I can recall the time when I speak English in front of the class, that is a class called English presentation, and I choose to share my internship experience as my final presentation. I would say that using a different language to express your idea is so special. You cannot mainly translate yours words into English, but to use the English conversation way to express the idea, that is quite difficult, but I think no matter which language you use, the most important thing is to transfer the purpose of the presentation to the audience, to let them know what you are talking about, and then to think about what kind of usage of the language will be the best to understand.

10. What internship you had done? Please tell me the detail. Go through your work experience in detail.

During the college year, I had done one part-time job and two internships. The first internship is being an online media writer, wrote articles that is related to entrepreneurship, company management and innovation. Also, I am responsible for managing our company’s Facebook fan page and to reproduce articles to other media companies.

The second internship is being a financial intern in the CTBC bank corporate finance information technology department, which I was assigned to do research on block chain. blockchain has a feature called the distributed ledger. it can serve as the third party checker, to ensure that any payment is correct and will not be falsified. so both parties such as buyer and seller or sender and receiver can check the payment detail without worrying about the payment is correct or not. and so my job is to think about how CTBC bank or other banks respond to the trend of blockchain and what kind of strategy can bank industry do to encounter this technique. is it to incorporate the technique into the bank or join with other banks to come up with a better financial service that combine the block chain technique? These are the thing that I mainly focus on during the two months of internship.

11. What is the reason for SMU to admit you?

I think due to my background in information and finance, I have the ability to code, and realize the knowledge of finance. Also, my internship in the banking industry also proves that I have the ability to do research. These are the external traits that I think SMU can get, but the most important trait, also an internal trait, is to communicate smoothly to others. I always feel that the difference between college and the working place is that you need to have the ability to express your idea clearly, and let the listener to understand your words. This is something that we cannot learn from school, because all we need to do is study, but as I experienced many kinds of internship, I get to know that talking about a story or presenting a concept to others is a thing like require practice. And I would be confident to say that I have this internal trait to communicate with others.

12. How do others judge you?

I think my friends, my parents and managers think of me as a person with perseverance, since I always want to do thing perfectly, hope that the result will be great to the receiver. However, this kind of personality has a bad side, as I expect everything to operates smoothly, a mistake or error appears will makes me feel very stressful. Also, I think my friends will see me as person who has a leadership trait, since I like to talk and express idea that might be helpful to the team, so I always being chosen to be the team leader.

13. Did you also apply for other school? Which school?

Yes, I also applied for University of Southern California, Purdue and Emory, and I all choose to study the master of Business Analytics as major.

14. Do you have any programming experience? What kinds of programming language you’d learned?

Yes, my college major is information and finance, so I had participated in some computer science classes during the undergraduate study. I learned JAVA programming in the freshman year, and database in the sophomore year, and learn about python and R language in the junior and senior year. I think it is important to master a programming language, such as JAVA, because when you start to learn a new programming language, it will be easy to understand the basic concept about it.

15. Have you study abroad or work abroad before?

Well, I had studied abroad for about two weeks when I was in the elementary school and I went to the U.K. It is the turning point that I set the goal of studying abroad in the future, I realized that the Western education creates an open and free environment that is different form the cramming educating as Asia country long promotes. But two weeks is so short that I cannot say that I’d totally accustomed to the Western study environment, but this experience really motivates me to study abroad in the future.

16. Have you ever used any kinds of statistical tools during internship or undergraduate study?

As I mentioned before, I had attended the Program Trading class during my senior year of college, and the analyzing tool we use in this class is the RStudio. My classmates and I built a simple trading strategy that uses r language to trade and analyze the performance. I think r language is an efficient tool to analyze big amount of data, since it is free and can implemented many packages. Also, the data graphic that developed by the RStudio is also very user-friendly. It can change different way of appearance by input various parameters.

面試尾聲教授還會問你有沒有問題要問他，這時不要傻傻說沒有，要問一些建設性的問題，讓教授知道你對這學校是有準備過的，我問的問題有：

1. How will the Business Analytics develop in 3 to 5 years? What kind of working industry is best suit of incorporating Business Analytics to maximum their profit or maximum their sales?

2. If I have the chance to receive the offer, what kind of preparation should I do and how to better accommodate into U.S.’s society? how to find a decent job in the U.S.?

記得當時是約了11/19台灣時間晚上點半面試，差不多是德州時間早上9點半，那天請了一天的假好好在家裡準備，早上已先畫好妝，晚上又再補妝一次，又請朋友幫我買御飯糰回來，但根本緊張到沒心情吃， 結果面試10點半開始，10點39分就結束了，只花9分鐘時間就結束，覺得自己講話一定像背稿，完全沒有語調起伏可言，總之，面試完後還有一個重要步驟，就是寫感謝信，雖然有些人認為不需要，因為寫了不一定能增加好感，寫得不好甚至會扣分，但基於美國人喜歡對事物保持熱情的人，所以還是寄封感謝信給教授：

Dear Ms. XXX,

Thank you very much for taking the time to interview with me. I very much enjoyed our conversation, and am even more convinced that the SMU Cox Master of Science in Business Analytics is perfect for me.

Best regards,

Emily Chen

網友分享面試須注意的事項：

1. 把燈放在電腦後邊，打開，照臉，這樣顯得臉亮一些

2. 手機，ipad關機，從而不會被影響

3. 注意眼神交流

4. 穿的正式一些，深色，（最好西裝）

5. 用body language點綴

6. 用一些手勢的話，讓手部運動在桌子下邊完成，這樣可以不讓面試官分心

7. 坐直，不要懶坐在椅子上

8. 表達對對方項目感興趣時要面帶笑容，顯得更加真實

9. 面試結束時，要確保Skype已經關掉，不確定時重啟電腦

10. 面試感謝信（Thank you note），要發，再加上被要求的文件和自己的聯系方式

11. 在安靜的地方，沒有回音的地方面試

12. 眼睛在屏幕的，從上至下三分之一處；眼睛和鏡頭持平，身體和鏡頭的距離是一個手臂長

13. 注意時區，不要搞錯面試時間

14. 永遠主謂賓講話，不要複雜語句

15. 回答不要超過6句，感興趣會繼續問的

16. 不要講錢的問題，就說家庭很supporting，fully supporting

17. 不要帶眼鏡

面試完每天都很緊張，早上醒來第一件事就是看手機有沒有email通知，永遠記得11/26當天早上收到一封信，說要登進申請網頁才看的到結果，帶著顫抖的手點進網頁，就出現了congratulation這個字，立馬跑出房門敲了室友的門，跟他說我錄取了，當時大概才7點多吧，他一臉睡眼惺忪的樣子如同當下不真實的感受，沒想到從大三開始準備接近兩年半的時間終於有結果了。

當然，為了說服爸媽親朋好友還有自己去德州這個較少人知道的地方讀書，也是查了非常多的資料，分析這所學校的優點以及缺點，因為SMU最多可以在12月26之前向學校回復要不要來讀，在這之前我還在等USC EMORY PURDUE的結果，所以就到12月底確定這幾所學校都沒有結果後就向學校教了1000刀的押金，正式準備就讀。

自己給的目標就是反正只要有一所錄取就去讀，因為申請到中期看到幾所申請的學校都沒錄取覺得心很累，所以告訴自己只要第一回合有錄取的學校就去讀，也不確定會不會有學校錄取我，所以現在收到率取通知，也沒打算申請第二輪的學校，就早早向學校寄了英文畢業證書以及成績單，想趕緊把i20處理好，開始研究所前的準備。所以下一篇將會介紹SMU MSBA以及為何吸引我來這裡讀書的原因~