Deep Dive: How to Answer The Dreaded "Tell Me About Yourself" Question in Your College Interview
Since many students have found our Ultimate Guide to College Interviews helpful, we’re diving deeper with a series on the most common interview questions. If you’re looking for general tips, feel free to check out our guide—but if you want to tackle specific questions, you’re in the right place.
We’re kicking things off by diving into the most open-ended question: “Tell me about yourself.” Its vagueness often catches students off guard. What should you focus on? How much detail is too much? This will likely be the very first question an interviewer asks you, and your response will frame the rest of the interview. You want to touch on the core aspects of your identity and interests; by doing so, you’ll open the door for follow-up questions that you’re prepared to answer. It’s an opportunity to introduce yourself in a compelling way that highlights your personality, values, and key experiences.
Step 1: Structure Your Answer
Instead of giving a chronological biography, structure your response using a narrative approach. One effective framework is:
Present: Start with a defining trait or passion.
Past: Share a key experience that shaped you.
Future: Connect to your aspirations and how this university fits.
Example:
I’d say curiosity defines me. When I was ten, I spent an entire summer trying to build a Rube Goldberg machine that could turn off my bedroom light. That curiosity turned into a love for physics and engineering, leading me to research sustainable energy solutions in high school. At MIT, I hope to expand on this by working with the Energy Initiative to develop scalable green technologies.
Step 2: Highlight Unique Details
Make your response memorable by including personal anecdotes and vivid descriptions. Instead of saying, “I love music,” say, “I spent the last year composing a violin concerto inspired by my grandfather’s stories of growing up in rural China.”
Step 3: Stories are Effective
We make sense of the world through narratives. Anecdotes and overarching narratives are compelling—and they’re memorable. If you want your interviewer to distinctly remember you from a pool of applicants they interviewed in the same week, tell them about yourself in a narrative framework.
Examples:
Example 1: When I was in middle school, I spent an entire summer building a treehouse in my backyard. I sketched blueprints, gathered materials, and learned how to use power tools with my dad. It wasn’t perfect, but that experience made me realize how much I love solving problems and creating things. That curiosity led me to explore engineering more formally. I started with small projects—taking apart broken gadgets to understand their inner workings, experimenting with coding, and eventually joining my school’s robotics team. I became particularly interested in lightweight structural design, a field that balances strength and minimal material use. I started researching tensegrity structures, an architectural principle that uses isolated rigid components held in place by a network of tensioned cables. I built my own small-scale tensegrity model, testing different materials to see which provided the best strength-to-weight ratio.
Example 2: I’ve always been fascinated by languages. My grandparents speak a dialect of Chinese that I was determined to learn. I practiced by watching regional TV shows, reading untranslated folklore, and even recording conversations with my grandma so I could replay and analyze the tones and sentence structures. That curiosity about language and culture is what inspired me to study linguistics and international relations. I became captivated by how certain words had no direct English equivalent—how language reflects not just communication, but an entire way of thinking. That curiosity led me to explore linguistic preservation and language policy, especially for endangered and under-documented languages. Outside the classroom, I studied the decline of heritage dialects among second-generation immigrants, particularly how tonal shifts occur when a language isn’t formally taught. I also researched machine translation biases, analyzing how AI models often struggle with dialectal variations, reinforcing linguistic hierarchies. These experiences deepened my interest in sociolinguistics and international relations, particularly how language policy shapes identity and diplomacy. I hope to study computational linguistics and language preservation, working on AI-driven tools that help document and revitalize endangered dialects.
Example 3: During my freshman year, I froze during a debate competition. I stood there, unable to form a response. That moment stuck with me, so I spent the next year studying logical frameworks, analyzing political philosophy, and refining extemporaneous speaking techniques. I worked with a coach to strengthen my ability to break down complex arguments in real time, and I even started dissecting Supreme Court rulings to understand how justices construct persuasive legal reasoning. By junior year, I had developed a deep interest in argumentation theory and legal rhetoric. I became fascinated by how judicial opinions, international negotiations, and even AI-driven debate models rely on structured reasoning. That experience shaped my resilience and ability to bounce back from setbacks, but it also sparked my passion for legal studies and computational argumentation—specifically, how we can use technology to analyze and enhance the way arguments are formed and evaluated.
Step 4: Keep It Concise and Engaging
Aim for a response that’s around one to two minutes long. You want to intrigue the interviewer, not overwhelm them with too much detail.
What to Avoid:
Listing accomplishments without context.
Rambling without a clear structure.
Being too generic—your answer should reflect you, not just any high-achieving student.
Final Thoughts:
Think of “Tell me about yourself” as an opportunity to showcase the most engaging parts of your story. Make it personal, concise, and reflective of who you are beyond just grades and extracurriculars.
