Where do you see yourself in ten years?

Whether you have a direction without being rigidly attached to a plan you can't yet make.

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

The trap

Either extreme. 'I have no idea' reads as drift; a rigid ten-year plan with revenue targets reads as someone who won't learn from the next four years.

How to structure your answer

Paint a concrete picture → name what's flexible and what isn't → connect to the training you're asking for.

Be specific enough to be real: setting, patient population, kind of practice
Name the values driving it rather than just the job title
Leave honest room for the field to change you

A weak answer

What most people say

In ten years I see myself as a practice owner with a well-established patient base, hopefully with an associate working alongside me by then. I'd like to be involved in my community and maybe mentor students coming up behind me. Mostly I want to be genuinely good at what I do and have a practice I'm proud of.

A picture with no place in it; anyone here could have said it.

A stronger answer

What lands

Ten years out I want to be in a two-chair office in a county like the one I work in now. I do outreach for a health department, and half our sealant days happen on a folding table in a school gym. So, rural, a lot of Medicaid, probably a mobile day once a month. What's fixed is the patient population. What isn't fixed is the setting. If that ends up being inside a community health center and I own nothing, that's fine. I'd rather commit to who than to what.

Concrete picture, then she says out loud which half is negotiable.

The second answer separates the thing she'd defend from the thing she'd give up. That's what a direction actually sounds like.

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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