Medical How to answer "Tell me about yourself" at interviews?

[MusicDOc124]

So I have two selections for the "tell me about yourself" question for interviews. The first one is about a personal characteristic related to medicine, while another is talking about hobby that is completely unrelated to medicine but exudes the character traits that make me a serious medical student prospect. At my mock interview, they told me that this question should be related to medicine, yet I've read on SDN and other websites that you should not talk about anything related to medically-related or medicine activities, because that will ruin the chances for other interviewers to ask the same thing. Goro's stance is to answer it as if "[my] long lost Aunt Sophia visits you from Poland and asked you, "So, [name here] sweetie, tell me about yourself".

What would be the best choice? Are there "technically" wrong answers here? Thanks.

Personal note/opinion: I've never talked about anything medicine related when asked to tell about me. I've done way too many other things that interest me more and are more telling of who I am that are not within medicine. Especially as a pre-med. At this stage almost everyone has some sort of medical experience - EMT, nurse, paramedic, CNA, MA, scribe, etc. What makes you different? That's who you are.

That said, there are ways to answer it both ways. The key is to tell the story in such a way that describes characteristics without saying the name of the characteristic.

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[Goro]

You should answer the question as if it were asked by long lost Auntie Kim from Great Britain, who comes to visit you.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

TMAY is your opportunity to frame yourself to the interviewer, whoever that may be and under whatever context you are allowed to answer. From your description, these are not open-ended prompts: they seem to be pretty specific in focusing your answer to a personal characteristic you have that is valuable to your practice as a health care provider. No specific correct answer, and I will not lead you to possible answers because you should demonstrate HOW you showed this characteristic (situation, task/threat, action, resolution, reflection STARR format).

Interviewers are never consistent about what they want to hear from you if everything HAS to tie back in to being a physician or not. If it's a panel/structured interview, I would more likely lean to tying it back into being a doctor unless the prompt said not to.