Interview Questions

"Tell me about yourself."

"I'm a senior at Cornell studying Communication with a minor in Business, and graduating a semester early in December 2026. Most of my experience has been at the intersection of sports, strategy, and working with clients.

My entry into sports was through basketball operations. I was a student manager with both Santa Clara and Cornell Men's Basketball, and then at THE·TEAM I supported basketball agents working with players across the NBA, G League, and international basketball. This allowed me to work directly with athletes, and exposed me to the representation side of sports and taught me how much detail and preparation goes into supporting athletes behind the scenes.

At AMAZN HQ I worked on athlete branding, partnerships, social strategy, and event execution, and most recently at Monumental Sports & Entertainment, I worked in internal communications, where I helped launch a weekly employee newsletter and build out the company's new intranet to improve the digital employee experience.

Through all of this, I’ve developed skills in relationship management, analytical thinking, communication, and sports business strategy."

"Tell me about a time you took initiative."

"One experience that stands out was working at Monumental Sports & Entertainment this summer. My main responsibility was to help build our new company intranet through a company called Staffbase. We wanted a more centralized digital employee experience, and this was a longer-term project compared to what other interns had to do, so I didn’t have as many day-to-day deliverables to work on.

So, to be productive and add value to my team, before our project officially began, I spent hours researching Staffbase through their support portal and learning modules to understand how the site would function and how to design pages. I became my boss's and co-workers’ “in-office expert” for questions on how to sort news channels, posts, and pages.

I also started thinking about designing the platform from the employee's perspective. I thought about what information employees actually needed, how easily they should be able to find it, and how pages and resources should be structured differently across desktop and mobile.

Over 2.5 months, I built and updated over 100 employee information pages, sorted optimal user groups, created standardized email templates, and taught my coworkers how to analyze engagement data so we could make more informed decisions about how information should be communicated.

My supervisors appreciated the initiative I took to get ahead on learning the ins and outs of the platform because I saved them lots of time learning it themselves, which streamlined the entire project.

“Tell me about a time you failed and what did you learn from it?”

"One mistake I made as a student manager for Cornell men's basketball involved coordinating our postgame meal. This was one of my main responsibilities, and we normally worked with restaurants that were familiar with our game-day setup, but for this particular game we ordered from a new restaurant. I assumed they would know where to make the delivery, and I didn't give them specific instructions about where to meet me.

When the food didn't arrive where I expected, I had to leave my responsibilities behind the bench, get my car, and pick it up myself. That meant the other managers had to absorb my responsibilities on top of their own, and I was also late getting the meal to the players.

I took responsibility for it because the problem wasn't really the restaurant. I had relied on an assumption instead of making sure they had everything they needed to execute correctly.

Since then, I've been much more deliberate about confirming logistics ahead of time, especially when I'm working with someone or an organization for the first time. I now know to overcommunicate and be extremely thorough for responsibilities that entire teams depend on me for. The experience also taught me that strong operational skills often come down to anticipating where miscommunication could happen before it becomes a problem.”

“Tell me about a time you handled adversity/problem-solved?”

"When I was a manager with Santa Clara men's basketball, I was the only freshman on the staff, so I was often responsible for some of the less glamorous but important operational tasks, including the laundry.

After a road game against San Francisco, the team got back around 11 p.m., and I was responsible for getting the laundry done so the players would have everything ready for practice the next morning. So I went to the facility, but I realized the laundry room was locked. My ID only gave me access to the locker room, so I had no way to get in.

I had an important school assignment I was working on that night as well, but instead of just going home and saying there was nothing I could do, I stayed at the facility. I worked on my assignment from the locker room while reaching out to people who could help me and thinking through other ways I could solve the problem.

Eventually, I remembered that I had met the head of campus security a few weeks earlier. I reached out, explained the situation, and because he had access to the facility, he came over and unlocked the laundry room for me.

I was able to get the laundry finished before practice the next morning and still complete my schoolwork. That experience taught me that when the obvious solution isn't available, I shouldn't immediately accept that something can't be done. I try to stay composed, use the resources and relationships available to me, and keep looking for solutions until I can deliver."

"Tell me about a time you managed multiple priorities."

"Working for THE·TEAM was probably the best experience I've had for learning how to manage multiple moving pieces because basketball representation doesn't stop at one project.

I was supporting agents with clients across the NBA, G League, international basketball, and college basketball. On a given day, that could mean maintaining game schedules, compiling performance summaries, tracking financial information, and working on scouting or recruiting projects.

I learned to separate what was time-sensitive from what was simply important. A client-related scheduling item or game-day deliverable obviously had a different deadline than a longer-term research project.

I became much more disciplined about organizing work based on urgency, understanding who depended on my output, and communicating early when something required clarification.

That experience taught me that prioritization is really about understanding downstream consequences, not just creating a to-do list."

"Tell me about a project you're proud of."

"One project I'm particularly proud of was conceptualizing and developing the AMAZN Youth Basketball camp for our All-Star Showcase.

AMAZN focuses on elevating Asian and Asian American athletes for younger generations to see and have that representation. For our event, we wanted to figure out a way to give back to the community. Being from Southern California where our All-Star game was held, I developed the idea for a youth basketball camp that would allow our athletes to coach elementary and middle school basketball players, teaching them the foundations of the game.

I utilized my connections growing up playing in Socal Asian basketball leagues and took the lead with both the marketing and operational sides of the event. I executed email marketing, event logistics, designed the Eventbrite page for tickets.

What made it especially valuable was seeing the impact on the young athletes and their families. I was able to create a live-event that delivered on what AMAZN HQ’s mission statement was, and seeing how many different functions worked together to create one experience was very rewarding. We sold 200 additional tickets through this camp and it has been a returning part of the weekend ever since.

It showed me that I really enjoy taking something from an idea through execution."

"Tell me about a time you worked with different stakeholders."

"At Monumental, internal communications naturally required working across departments because the information we were publishing often originated somewhere else in the organization.

When working on the Staffbase intranet and The Game Plan newsletter, I had to think about both sides of that relationship: what the department providing the information wanted employees to know, and what employees actually needed in order to understand or act on it.

That meant taking information that could be complicated or department-specific and turning it into something clear, accessible, and appropriately structured.

I learned that cross-functional communication isn't just passing information between groups. You have to understand each stakeholder's objective and then translate between them."

"Tell me about a time you demonstrated leadership."

"My clearest leadership experience has been becoming Head Student Manager for Cornell Men's Basketball.

What I've learned from that role is that leadership in an operations environment is different from having formal authority. Your job is often to make everyone else's job easier.

I'm responsible for coordinating day-to-day operational responsibilities of my team of managers, communicating with coaches, managing equipment and practice needs, and helping make sure information and film are where they need to be.

As I became more experienced, I also became someone younger managers could look to for direction. I had to shift from thinking only about whether my own responsibilities were finished to thinking about whether the entire operation was functioning correctly.

That's probably been my biggest lesson in leadership: your own execution matters, but ultimately you're responsible for the standard of the group."

"Tell me about a time you worked in a fast-paced environment."

"Working in basketball representation taught me this particularly well because the environment is inherently time-sensitive.

At THE·TEAM, I was supporting agents whose clients were playing across multiple leagues and levels, so there were constantly games, schedules, performance information, and logistical details changing.

I couldn't treat every assignment like an isolated school project where I had several days to perfect it. I had to understand what information the agent needed, verify that it was accurate, and get it into a usable format quickly.

That environment made me much more comfortable balancing speed with accuracy. I learned that being fast doesn't mean rushing; it means having a reliable processes that could help me deliver the best results and in a timely manner."

"Tell me about a time you were creative."

"At AMAZN HQ, creativity wasn't just about making content look good. We were trying to build stronger visibility around Asian and Asian American athletes, so we had to think carefully about the stories we were telling.

I analyzed content performance and helped develop our social strategy, and around Super Bowl LVIII I wrote scripts for video content tied to AMAZN's presence around the event.

Several of those videos surpassed 100,000 views, and overall our social channels grew more than 23% during my time there.

That experience taught me to think about creativity strategically. I like starting with the audience and objective and then deciding what format or story will actually resonate, rather than creating something simply because it seems interesting."

"Tell me about a time you had to be detail-oriented."

"Representation work made attention to detail very tangible for me because small mistakes can affect someone else's schedule or decision-making.

At THE·TEAM I maintained game schedules, performance summaries, financial information, recruiting databases, and analytical materials for agents.

I developed the habit of checking information against the original source before putting it into something an agent would use. I also tried to make the final product easy to scan so that someone could quickly identify the information that mattered.

That taught me that attention to detail has two parts: the information has to be correct, and it has to be organized in a way that makes it useful."

"What's your greatest strength?"

"I think my greatest strength is that I have a pretty multifaceted skill set, but more importantly, I really enjoy learning and putting myself in situations where I have to develop new skills.

My experiences have been pretty varied. I've worked in basketball operations and analytics, athlete representation, brand strategy and content, event coordination, and most recently internal communications at Monumental. Because of that, I've had to become comfortable moving between analytical work, creative work, relationship management, and operational execution."

"I think a lot of that comes from being ambitious and curious. If there's something I don't know how to do, my instinct is usually to learn it rather than avoid it. I'm also comfortable making mistakes in that process, as long as I'm learning from them and not repeating them.

So I would say my strength is that I can enter an unfamiliar environment, learn quickly, ask good questions, and become useful in a lot of different ways."

"What is your biggest weakness?"

"One thing I've worked on is becoming comfortable asking questions earlier.

Especially when I was younger professionally, if I received an unfamiliar assignment, my instinct was sometimes to spend too much time trying to figure everything out independently before checking my understanding.

I've realized that in a professional environment, there's a difference between being resourceful and wasting time because you didn't clarify something.

Now I try to do enough research to understand the problem, identify exactly what I don't know, and then ask a specific question rather than either asking immediately or struggling with it for too long."