I’d list English as your mother tongue, and Mandarin as your native language.

Thanks for all the good posts on M&I. I have been reading your posts since I started the journey of trying to understand and getting into Investment Banking.

On the last bit of this post, you mentioned Language Skills, saying whether you’re advanced … etc. I have listed Mandarin as my Native language, which is the truth. I was born and raised in Taiwan and went to international school… before coming to London. That makes English my “professional” language while I speak Mandarin Chinese as my mother tongue. When it comes to interviewing or explaining thoughts, it seems like my English is much stronger than my Mandarin. In this case, should I still list Mandarin as my Mother Tongue?

That was a long question. Please let me thank you in advance for your time on reading the questions. I look forward to reading your response!!! Happy New Years!

Best,
Shawn

Depends on you messed up. Usually it is hard to “recover.” And sometimes you may have performed better than you thought. I’d make sure you send each interviewer a thank you note after your interviews.

Thanks for your feedback. Great comment. Yes I agree with you. In some cases though people may just ask “what do you mean by basic in XX language” so I think if someone is confident enough with the language, he/she can list it on there (as long as he/she isn’t “fluffing”)

It is a bit hard for me to determine why you got dinged without having seen your documents. With the above being said, it is likely that your documents led to you not getting an interview because interviewers judge candidates based on such documents before interviewing them

One interviewer, who I spoke to last week in a 45′ phone interview, specifically said there would be no questions on a particular technology topic that he brought up as one of the areas he was working on at the moment–his words were “We wouldn’t ask you about x topic, for instance, because that’s something you’d pick up depending on which project/vertical(w/n financial services) you were working on.” Further instruction was that the interview portion of the assessment would consist of 2 case interviews that would be market sizing-related questions and brainteasers.

Fast forward to interview: Interviewer (with whom I’d spoken) now with a colleague also interviewing me: “Well if I recall our phone conversation, we discussed so and such technology-related topic in detail. Could you summarize our discussion?”
?????

In the week between the phone interview and the case interview(s) I spent time on Management Consulted and similar sites trying to quickly master the case interview format…and was completely thrown by what actually happened–the first case interview wasn’t a case interview at all–I got the sense that the 2 running the first case hadn’t prepared questions ahead of time, so they were asking random very open-ended questions.

A potential salvageable point is that there were 2 case interviews, and the 2nd case (or the only actual case), another 2-on-1 case interview that went smoothly for the scheduled half hour. At the end one associate left to attend a scheduled meeting, and the other stayed in the conference room and spoke with me for an additional half hour about the role, and life, etc. Good rapport, and fit is very important in this role–both sets of interviewers told me this).

I don’t want to get dinged for the first interview (I was shell-shocked about the 180 that was pulled on the subject matter, not a great impression to leave.)

Is it appropriate to write a thank you note to the interviewer I had my phone interview, who was the primary contact, and who (unfortunately) asked questions specifically outside the scope that he had indicated that I prepare for and as diplomatically as possible remind him of our actual phone discussion, and apologize for having been caught off guard and not assuming that anything he mentioned would have been fair game?

(TBH, it seemed like an honest oversight on his part, not a stress tactic…)

I am sorry to hear, but it happens to the best of us. Yes, do it. You have nothing to lose!