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.
How to structure your answer
- 1Name all three up front
- 2One real sentence on each
- 3What 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 strong answer
What lands
My grandmother Maria, James Baldwin, and Rosalind Franklin. My grandmother 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 her questions about herself and our family. 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.
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.
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.
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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