How do you answer “tell me about yourself” as a new graduate?

It is asking which piece of your work this job can check. A life story does not answer it. A polished script that could belong to anyone does not answer it either.

A master's graduate put the problem in one sentence on a public thread: "Everyone says don't cite your cv and say what you can do for them." They had done a thesis inside a company, in the same field as the job, and still did not know whether to use it. The thread.

Cite the work. Say what it produced. Then stop.

On 24 September 2026 a web search for this question returned sample scripts from a job board, a professional-network list, a university career office, and a question site. The scripts are someone else's career. They cannot be your answer.

One comment on the thread above is the failure mode. It tells the student to sound like they already work there, and offers a sentence in the shape of "I automated their data processing which cut analysis time by 40%." The 40% was not in the thesis. It was a suggestion for how to sound impressive. We do not use it, and we do not publish a substitute percentage.

This person is fictional. The lines are an example, not a result from a real resume.

Maya's first draft: "I am a hard worker and a fast learner, and I am passionate about technology."

The line that answers the question: "In a course project I wrote the test plan for a checkout prototype and found three cases the demo failed. The posting asks for someone who can test a flow before it ships."

The line we will not write for her: "I improved conversion by 40%." Nothing in the project recorded a conversion rate. If her notes had recorded one, the sentence could use that number and no other.

Use four beats, in this order.

1. The work: the course, the internship, or the campus job, named as what it was.
2. What you produced: the plan, the prototype, the analysis, the shift you ran.
3. The requirement on this posting that the work speaks to.
4. Stop. Do not add a result the work did not have. Do not claim a teammate's part as yours.

If the months after graduation come up, say what you did in them. We do not publish a normal length for a search. One person on that thread had finished in April and had sat five interviews. That is their story, not a benchmark.