What accomplishment are you most proud of?

Your values. What you pick matters more than how impressive it is.

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

The trap

Choosing the highest-status item on your CV without any emotional connection to it. A small thing you fought for beats a big thing that came easily, every time.

How to structure your answer

Name it → what made it hard → what you did → why this one over the others.

Pick something you actually care about over something that sounds prestigious
Explain the difficulty so the achievement has weight
Say explicitly why this one
Credit anyone who helped

A weak answer

What most people say

Probably graduating with honors while I was teaching full time. I finished my prerequisites at night over four years and still kept my GPA above a 3.7, which took a lot of discipline and a lot of very late nights. It's the thing on my application I'd point to first.

The highest-status line on the file, offered with no feeling attached to it.

A stronger answer

What lands

The one I'm proudest of isn't on my transcript. My youngest was three when I started night classes, and there was a February I sat in the car outside the community college and decided I was done. I went in anyway. My sister took the kids Tuesdays and Thursdays for two more years so I could keep going. Finishing was good, but what I'm proud of is that I didn't quit in a parking lot where nobody would ever have known. Half of it belongs to my sister.

Picks the private harder thing, explains the weight, and credits the person who carried it.

The second answer costs something to say out loud. That's the whole difference between an accomplishment and a line on a resume.

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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