Long Island City wrap up

My deepest apologies for keeping all of you in suspense about yesterday’s second round interview at the credit card division of a major financial firm. I usually try to update this blog as soon as possible while the information is still fresh in my head but oftentimes this proves difficult and I have to resort to blogging about it the next day which is not nearly as exciting as blogging about it while I am still “in the moment.”

 

I landed at LaGuardia Airport two hours early, met up with a classmate who was on the same flight and we took a cab together to the tallest building Queens. We got there at noon and met up with two other classmates and one student from Kellogg who were all interviewing on the same day. The afternoon’s program began with lunch being served in a conference room. This lunch was really a warm up for the three hours of behavioral interviews ahead. As the five of us chowed down on sandwiches and cookies, one of the three people from the management associate program began firing away by asking “so what do you folks do for fun?” As the five of us began to go around the table to give our answers, the question quickly became "how do you get people aboard a project you are working on?" When it got to my turn I tried my best to be suave and answer the question while holding a ham sandwich on my right hand. This reminded me of the dinner at the Sienna Hotel the night before the first round interview where the representatives from the company were totally trying to use the informal event as yet another opportunity to try to feel us out.

 

The three interviews went pretty well. Each interviewer was given sheets of paper, each sheet representing a different skill set the interviewer was to ask us about with two to three possible questions to use. The one surprise was that noneof the interviewers were either current or former participants of the management associate program for which we were applying for. One interviewer was a manager responsible for the web offerings and another worked in risk management responsible for mitigating the bank’s risk on the portfolio of outstanding balances held by its cards’ customers.

 

Me and my three classmates left shortly after 4 and took a quick subway ride across the East River into Manhattan where we proceeded to dine on fillet mignon before hopping into a cab back to LaGuardia.