Hello y'alls. I am applying to the international affairs masters program at the Bush School at Texas A&M. So far, the admissions committee invited me to attend the MPIA Interview Conference next week on March 5 and 6. I was wondering, txaggie10, wendol, lbjane and surrender, if any of you had advice and tips on how to give a positive first-impression at the two 15-minute interviews and perform well on the writing assessment. What kind of questions will the interviewers at Bush ask me?
As for myself, I earned a BS in Biochemistry from a large public university in California with a cumulative GPA of 3.86. I was once enrolled in the microbiology Ph.D program at UT Austin for 2.5 years but decided to drop out for several reasons, mainly that I was more interested in international affairs than academic research science and that basic lab research was not for me. I managed to get out with a graduate GPA of 3.64. Outside my academic credentials, I got on my recent GRE exam a 720 for quant, 540 for verb and 4.5 for analytical writing. I am also very proficient in Mandarin Chinese, which I built up from growing up abroad in Taiwan and Hong Kong (Bush offers a China Studies certificate along with the MPIA degree, which interests me). I also acquired more than enough leadership experience through serving as a volunteer summer English teacher in Beijing, tutoring all levels of chemistry and biology to college and high school students and working as a TA twice for an first-year introductory biology course at UT. What do you think are my chances of getting into Bush?
