The day began with a gathering of MBA students from various specializations at FLUNO center. David Ohvall began his presentation by pointing out the importance of the case interview and by giving reasons why the interview is increasingly becoming a preferred method by employers. The case interview is very common in the Consulting and Investment Banking industries. But as David pointed out, former consultants and I-Bankers taking corporate roles are the champions of the case interview. According to David, proponents of the case interview would argue that the method gives an interviewer a good idea of a candidate’s analytical and problem solving skills because it is unlike other methods in that it challenges a candidate to think on his feet. During the opening section, David gave a good firm work on how to tackle a case. He talked about the qualitative aspect of the interview such as warm-up section, warmth and client readiness, integration and creativity, and thinking outside the box. With respect to the quantitative aspect, he talked about the use of charts/tables, estimations, equations, and data dump to draw insights on the case. He also stressed the need to ask follow-up questions and to close with a solid resolution of the problem at hand.

After the opening section, the ACFIN students joined David in the afternoon for the workshop section. The workshop section was very interesting in that we were given cases to tackle. It was during the workshop that I learned about myself – I need more practice with the case interview. When we were asked to work in groups of three on a case, I did not know where to begin, how to firm the problem, and how to zero in on the key parts that were needed to crack the case. One of the cases went like this, “Company X is a threat to the wildly popular iTunes. Rather than insist that users buy their songs, company X will allow users to rent their songs…..Is this a real threat to iTunes? What actions should iTunes take?” We were asked to give a respond in a little under ten minutes. After stumbling over some possible solutions and running out of time, I was glad to have gotten help from David who walked us through the case. However, as we tackle a few more cases, I began to feel confident with my insight on how to crack a case. I left the workshop knowing that I need a lot of practice to become completely confident with the case interview. The case interview is like other interviews in that the more practice the better. I bought a copy of David’s MBA Case, because I know somewhere down the road I will walk into a case interview.