What was the IMT PGDM interview experience like? Was it chill or grilling?

IMT's CTPI (Common Test and Personal Interview) process shows genuinely mixed experiences across candidates — so there isn't one clean answer here, and we think it's worth being honest about that.

The most commonly reported tone is relaxed. A candidate who interviewed at the Chennai center described an overall chill experience with no GK questions, no puzzles, and no aggressive grilling. The panel focused entirely on goals and future aspirations. Merchandise — mugs, pens, calendars — was provided during the process, which, small as it sounds, signals a certain kind of candidate experience philosophy.

That said, center and panel matter enormously. From what we've tracked across interview experiences, Delhi center feedback has been notably different — candidates describing being "grilled left and right." And even within Chennai, another candidate with a distinctive background in food technology reported their interview felt like a disaster, with panelists who seemed disinterested. Same city, same process, very different rooms.

On question patterns: the themes we've seen surface repeatedly include Why MBA after engineering?, What does a manager do?, Why does management fit you?, and probes into unethical business practices. Technical backgrounds weren't always left alone — at least one panelist pushed back hard on a candidate with strong undergraduate marks who expressed a dislike for coding, asking them to genuinely justify the career pivot. Questions also ranged from soft territory (family, hometown) to fairly specific technical areas, including distinctions between ML, generative AI, and agentic AI.

The WAT topic doing the rounds was whether companies should continue deploying agentic AI despite documented customer service errors — a reasonably current and debatable prompt.

A few process-level observations worth noting: several candidates felt the interview felt rushed, with early slots correlating to faster result turnarounds. Some panels gave the impression of wanting to wrap up quickly — "like they wanted to go to lunch" is how one candidate put it, which may be candid or may reflect a particular panel dynamic on a particular day. Interestingly, when compared to top IIMs, IMT drew favorable mentions for hospitality — though one candidate noted they received only a cup rather than anything more substantial, which generated some amusement in the retelling.

For context on the profile range we've seen discussing this process: a 93.58 percentile candidate with a 7/8/8 academic profile as a fresher, where a 64 in VARC prevented IIM sectional clearance, was among those who found the IMT interview experience positive. There's also a broader sense among experienced observers that this year's interviews felt unusually relaxed compared to previous cycles — which has raised some genuine speculation about whether results might surprise people in either direction.

Our read: prepare for a structured, goal-oriented conversation rather than a stress interview. But don't assume panel quality is uniform — the picture that emerges is one where your experience could vary significantly based on which panel you're assigned, not just which center you visit.