Before we start — tell me something about you that isn't anywhere in your application.

Whether there's a real person behind the file, and whether you can be spontaneous.

Written by Victoria Young, DDS · NYU College of Dentistry '24 · Penn Dental Medicine

The trap

Reaching for something that's secretly on your application anyway, or something so calculated it's obviously a plant. Real beats polished here every time.

How to structure your answer

One genuine thing → a short concrete story or detail → why it matters to you.

Pick something true and specific, not strategically impressive
Give one vivid detail so it lands
Keep it under 60 seconds
It's fine if it has nothing to do with dentistry

A weak answer

What most people say

I'd say the biggest thing about me is that I really value family. I'm the oldest of three and I've always been the one my siblings come to when something goes wrong, so I've become a pretty good listener. It's probably shaped who I am more than anything else I could point to.

Safe, strategic, and almost certainly already implied by her personal statement.

A stronger answer

What lands

I fix pinball machines. There's a bar two blocks from my apartment with four of them, and the owner let me start opening them up after I complained that one flipper was weak. I've replaced maybe thirty solenoids at this point. What I like is that the fault is always findable. You follow the wire until something is wrong. My roommate thinks it's a strange way to spend a Saturday, and it's the only hobby I've kept for six years.

True, specific, slightly odd, and nobody else today will say it.

The first answer is a quality anyone in the hallway could claim. The second is a thing only she actually does.

These are illustrations, not scripts. An answer you memorize sounds memorized — the point is the shape and the specificity, in your own words and about your own life.

Reading it isn't the same as saying it.

Most people can explain a good answer and still fall apart saying one out loud. Admitted asks you all 100 questions in a faculty voice, records you, and scores your pace and filler words.

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