If you could have dinner with three people, dead or alive, who would you pick?

What you actually value, delivered sideways. Nobody has a rehearsed answer, so they hear you think — and the three names tell them more about you than a page of your application does.

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

The trap

Picking three safe historical figures you have nothing to say about. Also: choosing dentists. It reads as an applicant who couldn't stop performing for two minutes, which is the opposite of what this question is testing.

How to structure your answer

Name all three up front → one real sentence on each → what the three of them have in common, if anything.

Commit to three names quickly; the deliberating out loud is what eats the clock
Give a reason that is yours, not the reason the person is famous
At least one should be personal — a grandparent, a former teacher, someone who wouldn't mean anything to us
Say what you'd actually want to ask them
If there's a thread connecting all three, name it at the end

A weak answer

What most people say

I'd probably say Abraham Lincoln, Marie Curie, and Nelson Mandela. All three of them accomplished incredible things under really difficult circumstances, and I think it would be fascinating to sit with them and hear about the obstacles they faced and how they kept going anyway.

Three safe names sharing one reason between them, which is no reason at all.

A stronger answer

What lands

My grandmother Rosa, James Baldwin, and Rosalind Franklin. Rosa sewed in a factory in Newark for thirty years and died when I was nine, so everything I know about her is secondhand. I'd want to ask what she thought she was doing, not what she did. Baldwin because I read Notes of a Native Son at sixteen in a waiting room and it rearranged me. Franklin because I want to know how you keep working when the credit is going down the hall. I suppose all three of them worked without much of an audience.

One name nobody else could have said, and reasons that are hers rather than the encyclopedia's.

The first list could be recited by anyone in the hallway. The second one has a grandmother in Newark in it.

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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