Interview Toolkit
Interviews are conversations where employers ask you questions about your skills, qualifications, and experiences. Employers also use interviews to assess your professionalism and communication skills.
This toolkit will help you ace your interview. If you have an interview coming up, schedule a practice interview with one of Career Advancement's specially trained interviewers!
Types of Interviews
Recorded interviews are prerecorded video interviews where employers ask a set of questions and students record their responses on screen.
They are often timed and may include both behavioral and job‑specific prompts.
These interviews allow employers to screen many applicants quickly, and they give students the flexibility to complete them on their own schedule.
Big Interview is an online interview practice platform that allows you to do mock recorded interviews, review your responses, observe your speech patterns, and build confidence before you interview with companies.
Log in here with your @uchicago.edu email address to get started!
Online assessments measure skills that are relevant for specific roles.
Depending on the industry, these may include math and data‑reasoning tests, personality or work‑style assessments, situational judgment tests, or role‑specific problem‑solving exercises.
Many finance, consulting, and technology companies use assessments early in the recruiting process to identify strong analytical thinkers.
Behavioral interviews focus on how you have responded to past experiences to predict how you might handle future situations.
Employers ask questions about teamwork, leadership, problem‑solving, adaptability, communication, and motivation.
Technical interviews assess your job‑specific knowledge and ability to apply key concepts.
In finance, this may include accounting fundamentals, valuation, markets questions, and mental‑math exercises.
In engineering and technology roles, technical interviews may involve coding problems, debugging, or scenario‑based design challenges. These interviews test both your technical skill set and your structured thinking.
Case interviews are a specific type of technical interview where you are presented a real or simulated business problem and ask students to walk through how they would solve it.
Common in consulting, strategy, and some finance and tech roles, case interviews evaluate analytical thinking, comfort with ambiguity, communication skills, and the ability to break complex problems into clear steps.
Students often work through market sizing, profitability, or operational scenarios with the interviewer.
Explore resources on our Careers in Consulting page for case interview preparation!
For behavioral interviews, the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) is a great strategy to structure your answers to questions where the employer asks you to "Tell me about a time when...".
The STAR method helps you create concise mini-stories where you:
Describe a situation you encountered in a previous experience
Map out the task that faced you
Explain the actions you took to address the situation
Outline the results of your actions
Sample STAR Interview Answer
Question: “Tell me about a time you encountered something unexpected on the job and you needed to think on your feet.”
Answer:
Situation: "Last spring, my supervisor at my on-campus job asked us to send a special mailing with a very tight deadline. Because this was an extra mailing beyond what we had planned, we didn’t have enough envelopes to meet the need."
Task: "To send the mailing on-time, I needed to track down 500 envelopes before the end of my shift."
Action: "I called 20 different offices on-campus to ask if they had any spare envelopes, which got me 400 envelopes. To get the last 100, I asked my supervisor if I could purchase more with her University credit card."
Result: "In the end, I successfully got all 500 envelopes, sent the mailing on-time, and saved the department money by tapping into existing inventory before purchasing new ones."
Ace Your Interview
Research the organization thoroughly by learning the company’s mission, recent news, key products or services, major clients, and competitors.
Understanding the firm’s priorities helps you tailor your responses and demonstrate genuine interest.
Resources to support this research include:
Organization website
News coverage of the organization
Industry publications
LinkedIn profiles for current employees
Interviews and podcasts with organization leaders
Annual reports and other organization documents
Informational interviews with alumni at the organization
Review the job description, note the technical and behavioral competencies they’re seeking, and be prepared to highlight examples that show how your experiences align.
Leverage the Practice Interview Program for mock behavioral, technical, and case interviews with both Career Advancement staff and peer advisers.
Go through your resume and prepare stories and examples in advance leveraging structured frameworks (like the STAR method) to clearly articulate your accomplishments, problem-solving skills, and teamwork experiences.
The most common first questions you may be asked in an interview are "tell me about yourself" and "walk me through your resume".
For "tell me about yourself", you should come prepared with an industry-specific answer that walks through your story developing an interest in the space, your recent experiences, and how this role connects to your career journey.
Please see the following links for guidance by industry:
For "walk me through your resume", you should provide a top-to-bottom review of your resume (i.e., most recent work experiences to oldest relevant work experiences).
Your actions at every stage of the hiring process - from when the employer first contacts you to when you send your post-interview thank you note - will shape the employer's evaluation of you.
Follow these best practices to ensure you make a good impression:
Respond ASAP to all messages from the employer
Use a professional tone in all of your communications
Treat everyone at the organization with courtesy and respect
Test your technology for virtual interviews, confirm directions and arrival time for in‑person interviews, and prepare your outfit and materials the day before.
Prepare 5-7 questions that show curiosity about the role, the team, and the company. Strong questions signal preparedness and engagement. Ensure that these questions are catered to your interviewer (e.g., a junior interviewer can share more about their experience given they’re in a role similar to the one you’re recruiting for vs. a senior leader can provide context on a company’s strategic vision).
Make sure your camera, lighting, and audio are set up properly so the interviewer can see and hear you clearly during virtual conversations.
Arrive or log in 10–15 minutes early to show reliability and give yourself time to settle in before the conversation begins.
Dress professionally in attire appropriate for the industry, whether the interview is virtual or in person.
Stay engaged throughout the conversation by maintaining eye contact, actively listening, and responding with clarity and confidence.
Keep your answers structured and concise, using examples to illustrate your experiences without rambling.
Maintain a positive, enthusiastic, and professional tone—interest in the role and organization leaves a strong impression.
Pay attention to your body language: sit upright, avoid fidgeting, and minimize distractions around you.
Have your resume, notes, and prepared questions accessible, but avoid reading from them so your interaction feels natural.
At the end of the interview, your interviewer will likely ask if you have any questions for them.
You'll want to prepare 3-4 substantive questions about the organization, the industry, or the role. Avoid surface-level questions that could be answered with a simple search of the organization’s website or the job description.
Sample questions:
“As someone who would like to join [Organization], I’d be curious to hear about your career path and what brought you to your current role.”
“When you think about your most successful employees, what’s made them stand out?”
“What upcoming project are you most excited about? How would I support that project if selected for the position?”
For more examples of questions specific to business industries, please refer to the following pages:
Before you leave, be sure to get contact information for everyone you've spoken to.
As soon as possible after the interview, send a thank you e-mail to everyone who met with you.
Tips for your thank you e-mail:
Keep it brief: a few sentences is fine but ensure that it is not generic
Thank the interviewer(s) for their time
Reference one or two specific things from the conversation
Reiterate your interest in the position
If you met one-on-one with multiple interviewers, it's best to send them separate thank you e-mails. If you met with a group of interviewers, you can send one e-mail to the group. If you met with multiple groups of interviewers, send each group a separate e-mail.
Sample Thank You Note
Dear Susan,
Thank you so much for meeting with me today. I really enjoyed learning more about the Chicago Analysis Group and your career path! As a fellow English major, it was fascinating to hear about how you use the skills you learned in college every day.
I especially appreciated you walking me through the marketing internship. The upcoming PR campaign sounds like it would be a really good fit for my video editing and copywriting skills!
Please just let me know if I can provide any additional information as you’re evaluating applications. Thank you for considering me for the marketing internship – I hope we get a chance to work together!
Best,
David Maroon
Practice Interview Program: schedule a practice interview and receive feedback from specially trained interviewers
Digital Practice Interviews with Big Interview: Big Interview is an online interview practice platform. With Big Interview, you can practice, review recordings of your responses, and even observe your speech patterns, eye contact, response time, and confidence level in a safe environment before you interview with companies. Log in with your @uchicago.edu email address to get started!