I just did some practice for case interviews. Students who have experience are offering their time this morning to help out students with no experience.

For some reasons, I had trouble finding sleep last night so I woke up a few minutes before my first case. I had to rush to school and could not quite put my brain in gear when I first tackled the first problem. So the feedback on the first case was so so - although apparently there were two sets of answers:

- the bare minimum for us to consider a next round
- the really nice to have to show extra creativity and lateral thinking => create differentiation

I missed two points of the bare minimum but I got a lot of points on the differentiated list. I was also too concerned at trying to fit everything into some kind of original framework and messed up with my own logic. The result, in my opinion, was extremely or extremely poor quality (my interviewer was too kind to tell me this though but I will equal a "not bad" with a "how awful, I hope that the others do better or I am going to be wasting my time here").

I then had time to recover and get caffeine. I also peeked over a preparation sheet, which I had failed to pick up, as I was too busy matching timetables of external speakers the day before. So I went into the second practice interview much better prepared.
I also decided to forget about anybody's framework and just use my own logic. I have a structured and analytical mind and if I can just translate out loud what my thought process is, that'll do. I can use the usual MBA framework (3 or 4 Cs, 4 Ps, 5 forces, etc...as a guideline to make sure that I am not forgetting anything).
It was also a lot easier for me because it was a Market Entry case - and I have marketing experience so I could run down the list of qualitative aspects very mechanically. The second question was about sizing a market (that I knew nothing about) but it was quite easy to find out factors that would influence the demand, from experience.

In the first case, I was supposed to answer: should the firm enter this market or not
In the second case, I was supposed to give a number: what is the market size

The feedback that I got on the second case was that I was very good at structuring my thoughts and introducing them.
I was also good at giving out all the qualitative aspects that would affect the decision in no time (but then, in the second case, it was biased since I had marketing reflexes embedded in my line of thinking). I also took the time to clarify what was meant by "market" before setting off on a tangent. (in my case it was a pharmaceutical firm but the market was not drugs, it was only anti-depressors, and it was not the world, it was only France and it was not generic, it was branded or in other words prescribed drugs).
I was not good at concluding. By then, I had all the information as when I brought up a relevant point, my interviewer gave me qualitative data to help me build my case. I was still looking for some possible tricks: had I forgotten anything? I finally gave an answer but I made my interviewer very perplex for a while. I am not comfortable making loads of calculation very quickly in a pressured environment. In my case, most of them were easy but my reluctance to do so would transpire. The good news is that I can easily work with that: through practice, work with order of magnitudes, find short cuts, etc... I stumbled on the same problem.

My takeaway if I want to pursue this: I will trash any possible artificial framework when it comes to presenting my ideas and rely on my own internal way of thinking. I must practice a lot more improvisation and quick exploration of numbers and possibility in any unit, in any format to get to a conclusion quicker. Not all is lost, I have something to work with!