“Tell me about yourself.”
The interviewer is staring, my heart is palpitating, and a silence hangs as I search my mind for adjectives. A full year after college applications, I’ve gotten no better at describing myself in a few words.
Or perhaps, more precisely, I’ve successfully reduced my life to sound bites, from which I select a few samples during each interview. To the world, this might be considered a more or less satisfactory answer. But I question whether this simplification counts as truly describing myself. After all, I am more than a series of adjectives. More than a series of labels and short phrases. If essays and interviews are meant to be an alternative to box-checking austerity, its current representation encourages precisely the opposite.
I direct this criticism not merely at the status quo of job applications, nor at the classic college admission question of “What five words best describe you?” (I’m looking at you, Stanford.) I also direct this criticism at the way in which people introduce themselves—when meeting someone new in college, we almost always ask for four specific, yet superficial, pieces of information: (1) their name; (2) their dorm; (3) their home state; and (4) their intended major.
Well, to be clear, the name is actually an important piece of information. But the latter three questions, when answered, can amount to far more harm than good. Rather than allowing us to better understand each other, they often cause us to buy into the stereotypes surrounding a particular label. A very specific mental prototype comes to mind when one thinks of terms such as “computer scientist” versus “humanist” (the so-called “techie/fuzzy” division), or of one geographic region versus another (each of which holds its own stereotypes). Thus, when we ask these ostensibly factual questions upfront, we create mental images of people before we even get to know them. We typecast before we understand. Then, more often than not, we fail to see humans as the multifaceted, multitalented creatures we are.
The same critique applies to another commonly asked question: “What do you do?”
During move-in three weeks ago, I asked this thoughtless question of my roommate, and she had very aptly replied, “What don’t I do?”
Touché. Listing one’s resume is perhaps the worst way to get to know someone—it’s like trying to describe the taste of orange juice by listing its properties. “Well, you drink it to get more vitamins, and it’s great for when you have a cold.” That’s all well and good, but we don’t want to know what orange juice does. We want to know what it tastes like.
That taste is found through late-night conversations, dorm adventures in San Francisco, and chats in the hallways. It is found through learning the quirks of one’s personality before the facts of their academic interests; it is found when learning the answers to the latter three questions (dorm, home state, and intended major) becomes an interesting addition to rather than the constraints with which we view someone.
Thus, I offer an alternative to “tell me about yourself”—instead of asking for facts, ask for a story. Ask what makes them laugh, ask what keeps them awake at night. Human life is too complex to be explained even through entire books; why, then, do we expect it to be explained in mere sentences?
Let’s stop looking at our resumes and start looking at each other.
