Welcome to F1GMAT’s #askAtulJose series. I am Atul Jose. Today’s question is highly relevant for the “Tell me about yourself” MBA admissions interview question. The question is:
Q) How much time should I spend talking about my family in Interviews when the question is “Tell me about yourself”?
We have covered the 10-20-30-40 rule in our interview guide that would be relevant to this question. To summarize, 10 seconds should be dedicated to talking about your family, 20 seconds about Education and your leadership roles in college, 30 seconds on your current responsibilities at work, and 40 seconds about your passion related to your post-MBA goals. There is, however, one condition that should be an exception to this rule.
If you have an entrepreneurial background or come from the Military where your family had a huge influence on your career choice, then I would dedicate 30 seconds for the family, and keep the 20-30-40 rule for leadership in college, current responsibilities, and passion related to post-MBA goals.
Should you just cite your parents', siblings' titles or responsibilities and then pivot to how they influenced your career?
It depends.
If the interviewer starts with a bit of small talk, then it makes sense to use a story that demonstrates how the parents or siblings influenced your career.
One of the clients started the conversation about the legacy of his family. Coming from a military background where his great grandparent served in WW2, Grandparent in Vietnam War, Father in Irag war of 1990, it became an obvious choice to serve the country. When the family connection is obvious, then you don’t have to create any extensive narrative.
In another case, a client’s mother quit a lucrative and stable job to start an educational institution that has achieved significant business and social goals. The candidate was old enough to witness the transformation, and it fed into her thinking on risk-taking, solving problems, building teams, and persisting through setbacks. For this person, we created an interesting line about the insecurity of the candidate when moving from a city to a town where the start-up began. The change in the network, the lack of infrastructure, and the peers who had limited exposure – all created a sense of insecurity that pushed the candidate to embrace global experiences – be it with Space technology, Olympics, and other recognizable global initiatives. The family had a huge influence on her extracurricular and thinking, even if it came from a lot of insecurity. That answer was authentic, and needless to say, the candidate converted the interview to an M7 admit. Also, the start about the mother’s career choice became a good transition for the school and college initiatives she started and connected with the post-MBA goals as well.
So you can strategically use the family narrative to create a memorable “Tell me About Yourself” answer.
If your parents are coming from traditional professions – engineers, doctors, business person – you still can find that one event or habit or a routine that your parents encouraged that became an early exposure to your career. One of the clients who was a Chartered Accountant started gaining exposure to numbers when he was managing the counter at his father’s restaurant. He found a breakup of margins by products and even could create a database on optimum pricing based on the time of the day, helping the family increase the revenue by over 75%. This interest to use numbers and find business levers played into his accounting and later in his Finance planning role.
It is not easy to find such connections. That is why I am offering a mock interview service where I will help you prepare and script the right answer for all the standard and behavioral questions you are likely to face.