The final stage of the UPSC led IAS exam is the Interview or the Personality Test. Generally, the interview lasts for about 20 minutes, where the candidate faces questions from various topics.
It is generally conducted in the month of February and March.
The questions asked are meant to test your general awareness, etiquette, and overall personality.
Focusing on your soft skills is the key to succeeding in the IAS Interview.
Let’s jump on to what you should be prepared for. Starting with the introduction section, which has the most common set of questions:
- Tell us something about yourself.
- Where are you from? What is the place famous for?
- What is the meaning of your name?
- Tell us about your family.
In order to get this right, you need to prepare a 20 – 30 second responses. The deeper you go and the longer your answers are, the more chances are for you to get lost, and more set of weird set of questions will be targeted to you.
Questions on Education:
- Which is your favourite or least favourite subject and why?
- What were your subjects in school and in college and why did you choose the same?
- Why did you choose XYZ college?
- Would you call yourself the best student? Why?
- Do you think the things taught in school are relevant in today’s life? Why?
It is advised that if you are not comfortable answering certain questions/don’t know an answer, it’s better to be humble and honest rather than bluffing.
Current Affairs:
- What’s the most current news you know about?
- In the last few months, what are the issues you know about India or your state?
The only way to nail this is to be up-to-date with all kinds of news. One-dimensional answers are generally not appreciated, try sticking to the generics unless asked specifically.
Work:
- What was your job role?
- Why didn’t you continue with the job? Why do you suddenly want to become an IAS/IFS/IPS officer?
Questions related to job gap, short work experiences can also be asked.
Optional Subjects chosen in the exam:
- Why did you choose XYX as your optional paper?
- Why didn’t you choose your graduation subject as your optional? (if it’s different)
Certain questions related to the optional subject might also be asked.
Hobbies:
This part goes tricky a lot of times. Let’s say your hobby is reading books. The panel may ask you your favourite author, and thus questions about the same author may follow. So be careful in what you say.
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