by Apurv Johari (Nicholas 2010)
Having little idea about case interviews and being excited about them, I was looking forward to the workshop "Crack the Case". This was David's second visit to the school. Nicholas students were privileged to have a complete two hour exercise with him on top of the regular session that was being hosted in the newly inaugurated Plenary room. David was a former Manager at Bain & Company and now runs his own institute coaching about case interviews.
For those who are not aware about case interviews, they are generally used by consulting firms to evaluate candidates. The broad skill set and limited time to accomplish things is what the case interview best measures.
We started with the session and it was far more interactive than expected. David began with an explanation of the open approach for looking at problems, no matter how weird they may same. If there was one thing that everyone walked away from the session with, it was what is the best way to get started with the most horrible looking cases. It's simple, just look for the breadth of the issues you can think of, and then look for depth in each of them. Some answers may seem to be stupid, but don't discard them, note them down. The paper, pen and notes are your best friends for the case interview.
What I really liked was the engaging approach of the program. After having a lesson of some key strategies, we were split into groups. All of us had least expected to have a case interview, with each other, right at that moment. I had no idea how we would handle these interviews. To top that off, we got the ugliest of the questions: "How many cabs are there in New York" and "How do you reduce the fuel costs of an airline". Trying our hands at the approach that we had just learned, we were happy to reach quite near the solutions to these problems.
The session continued with input from all classmates on their experiences and problem solving methods. We frequently got involved in small exercises about how to do financial, marketing, and a whole bunch of other management analysis. The best part of these exercises was to make presentable notes and to tactfully ask questions to the interviewer, to act as clues to crack the case.
As I thought, the toughest portion of the exercise was over, David then asked someone to volunteer for a "Mock" case interview. Feeling that it would be the best thing to do to learn from the session, I volunteered, and believe me, I had no idea of what was coming my way. Whithin moments I was interviewing, that too, in front of the entire class. It was an awkward but exciting feeling. David eased the pressure by throwing a couple of interview questions to the other classmates. We did a case on a manufacturing firm and I walked out with a great experience of being Case Interviewed.
We wrapped up the first section and made our way to the next session in the Plenary room. All of the other MBA students waited there for the presentation to start. Some of the things that he said there were already known to the Nicholas Center students. He put up an interesting case about Canadian currency. Although I did not answer many of the questions that were thrown at the audience, I knew that I had answers to nearly all of them.
Now when I look back on the afternoon that we started the "Crack the Case" session, I am reminded at how much I learned in just one day regarding these types of interviews. If someone asked me about the main takeaway of this session, I would say that now I look beyond the case interviews and try to solve many day-to-day business problems with a "Crack the Case" approach.