Tell me about a time you had to learn something new quickly.
Pick a new topic with a real deadline. Show how you narrowed it to what mattered, learned by doing the actual work, and got an expert to check you early. End with the result and what you still had to learn afterward.
See this answer go from 50 to 90
Example answer
50/100
In my junior year I was a research assistant for a labor economics professor. Three weeks before a conference deadline, the graduate student who handled the data left for a job. The professor asked me to take over cleaning 1.4 million job posting records. The work was in Python, and I had never written a line of code.
I'm a fast learner, so I watched a lot of tutorials and put in long hours until I figured it out.
I gave the professor the cleaned file before the deadline, and she was really happy with it. It showed me I can pick up anything if I work hard enough.
What holds it back
"I'm a fast learner" is the claim the story is supposed to prove. Tutorials and long hours describe effort, so the listener learns nothing about how this person learns or how good the result was.
In my junior year I was a research assistant for a labor economics professor. Three weeks before a conference deadline, the graduate student who handled the data left for a job. The professor asked me to take over cleaning 1.4 million job posting records. The work was in Python, and I had never written a line of code. I had 19 days, so I had to decide how to learn. The obvious route was the university's online intro course, about 40 hours. I chose not to take it. I read the old scripts first and learned only the parts of Python the task used. I also knew I wouldn't spot my own mistakes. So I asked a PhD student down the hall, Mei, to read my code every other day, and I checked my output by hand as I went. I gave the professor the cleaned file before the deadline, and she presented the paper on time. What I took from it is that under a deadline I should learn the small part I need and get someone to check me.
In my junior year I was a research assistant for a labor economics professor. Three weeks before a conference deadline, the graduate student who handled the data left for a job. The professor asked me to take over cleaning 1.4 million job posting records. The work was in Python, and I had never written a line of code. I had 19 days, so I had to decide how to learn. The obvious route was the university's online intro course, about 40 hours. I chose not to take it. I read the old scripts first and learned only the parts of Python the task used. That came to six things, like reading files, merging tables and matching text patterns. I practiced each one on 1,000 rows of our own data. I also knew I wouldn't spot my own mistakes. So I asked a PhD student down the hall, Mei, to read my code every other day, and I checked my output by hand as I went. After each change I compared 200 records with what I'd have coded myself. The first check matched 81%, which showed me my text matching was dropping postings that used abbreviations. By day 16 the hand check matched 97%. I gave the professor the cleaned file three days before the deadline, and she presented the paper on time. I'm still not a programmer, and a real one would have been faster. What I took from it is that under a deadline I should learn the small part I need and get someone to check me. I now set up that check on the first day.
Structure it with the STAR method template
What the interviewer listens for
- Was it new to you, and was there real time pressure?
- Did you have a method, or just more hours?
- How did you know you'd learned it well enough?
- Do you know the limits of what you picked up?
Common mistakes
- Describing effort instead of method.Late nights and tutorials are what everyone does, and the interviewer wants to know how you'd get up to speed on a new client in a week.
- Leaving out how you checked yourself.Learning fast without a test of the result is just being confident fast.
- Claiming you became an expert.Three weeks makes you useful on one task, and saying so sounds more credible than overselling.
- Picking something you already half knew.Learning a second spreadsheet tool doesn't show you can start from nothing.
More behavioral and fit
- Tell me about a time you had to work without clear direction.
- Describe a time the numbers and the stories you were hearing did not match. What did you do?
- Tell me about a time you achieved something difficult against real obstacles.
- Tell me about a time you had to make a decision without all the information you wanted.
- Tell me about a time you had more work than you could finish on time.
Consulting behavioral interview questionsAll interview questionsBehavioral interview practiceTimed video practiceHireVue interview questionsMcKinsey PEI questions
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