Personalized MBA Interview Coaching for the M7 and Beyond

Doing a mock interview with Obinna was really helpful in advance of all of my interviews. I was able to get in a full mock, so practicing a forty minute interview as if it were the real thing, I think was really important to figuring out exactly which answers I needed to make sure I had a little bit more clean versus those that I probably had a little bit too rehearsed. Having the feedback from Obinna was also really helpful to understand where I needed to focus my effort in the practice ahead of my actual interviews.

I was definitely a little nervous, but I felt well prepared. The Darden interview is interesting or unique because it has their version of the tell me about yourself question. They want you to talk for about five to ten minutes, which is a really long time, but I had rehearsed that pretty extensively with Obinna, and I think that maybe helped calm my nerves a little bit. I think it was super helpful kind of knowing what to expect.

The official interviews were quite similar to the Menlo Coaching mocks. It was great to have the opportunity to sort of present to someone and be able to articulate my story and my answers in a consistent and coherent way, that did help me a lot on on both of the interviews.

Obviously there are things Obinna can’t control regarding the individual interviewer and their style, but when it comes to the type of questions you’re gonna encounter, the sequence of those questions, what’s being looked for in those questions, the follow ups to those questions, which are very unique in the MBA world and being prepared for those follow ups or proactively answering some of those follow ups, having the right questions and making sure you hit all the right notes—I think the Menlo mocks were very similar and representative of what to expect in the actual interview.

The mock interview sessions really helped calm my nerves because especially before the Harvard interview, I was super nervous about how this interview is gonna be structured and what type of questions they could ask. And it’s very difficult to practice that on your own because you are not in this environment with a second person. And so having this real life practice, I think, made me a lot calmer in the end in the real life interviews.

That was a fun call, I’d say. I definitely found it to be really interesting. Learned a lot about communicating and my communication style, which I had not known about before, and learned some very helpful tools that helped me in the interview. It reminded me of, you know, taking an acting class in high school or, you know, performance art or something like that where you set your body and your voice up well to speak and present, and I’m definitely a believer in that.

I think a couple of the questions that he gave me ended up being there for my actual interview, was really, really helpful. I had, like, I’ve done this before. I’ve said this before. I know exactly what I’m saying. I know where I’m going with this. That was super helpful. And Obinna really, you know, helped me focus on what I need to improve on, and he gave me a a great piece of advice during it as well and said, just be yourself. Like, there’s nothing you can change.

One of the things that was extremely helpful was in my pacing as I tend to get I speak a little bit faster when nervous, and that really shows. And I tend to sort of fill in the blank space rather than being confident and giving myself time to think through my answers before I speak. That was something that was extremely helpful to be aware of as I went through all the interview process. Obinna was also very helpful in pointing out the areas that I should prepare more.

I thought the Menlo Coaching interview prep was really invaluable. For context, when I started preparing for my interviews, I was a bit lost and really not doing very well in my practices. But by the end, I felt really prepared and confident and comfortable going into the interview.

I think in particular, something that was useful for me was being trained on how to reframe the interview in the sense that trying to think about an interview not just from the perspective of me being asked questions, but to think about an interview from the perspective of mutual fit between the two parties. And I think that that takes a lot of the pressure off the interview. And that’s something I took away from the Fearless Communicator session that I think will, again, be useful for me in the future as well.

I think that’s one of the the strengths of Menlo. I think they understand the nuances of interviews at different schools. I actually had mock interviews with multiple people at Menlo and getting different flavors of, of interview style, I thought was really helpful. I did two mocks with Obinna.

I worked with Obinna to prepare for my NYU Stern, Fuqua, and Booth interviews. From the very beginning of our first session, Obinna put me at ease and boosted my confidence. We quickly developed a strong rapport. He provided tactical advice on how to enhance my stories and how to tailor each interview to align with each program’s interviewing style. He came to our sessions with intentional questions. Working with Obinna was a highlight in my MBA application journey. I believe it was a key ingredient in my success!

I had the pleasure of working with Obinna Arizor to help me prepare for my full-time MBA interviews. I didn’t have too many expectations going into the interview and even as we started, it seemed rather straightforward and like a simple practice round. Then when we finished… Obinna went hard. What felt like a somewhat poker-faced mock interview with little real-time feedback (good practice), ended with an extremely detailed and well-thought feedback session. The poker face was clearly just for my own practice, and it was clear that Obinna was taking note of every word I was saying, and offered really helpful feedback for me to improve. Some feedback even involved reshaping or cutting out certain parts of my stories which was a bit uncomfortable in the moment, but ultimately the right call. Obinna will give it to you straight, and make the most out of your investment. Cannot recommend his services more!

To be honest, the preparation time was quite short. I had less than a week of preparation time, and I scheduled two interviews with Obinna, and he gave me a lot of candid feedback, and at the same time, he also gave me a lot of encouragement, and to make myself, you know, confident about this upcoming interview. I think that really helped me a lot in preparing for this interview, sort of last minute.

I was pretty comfortable with the case interviews but being able to piece together why I had moved from job to job and was trying to move again, was an important piece to me. And it was something that I was worried about, but Obinna helped me to kind of piece that together. We started off just chatting about what I wanted to do, why or what I needed prep for. And then he started running me through questions similar to what I was going to most likely be receiving on an actual interview.