Tell Me About a Time You Showed Initiative: Examples

Initiative questions are the ones students most often answer with a story that is really about obedience. “My teacher asked for volunteers and I put my hand up” is not initiative; it is compliance with a smile. The question is asking about a moment when nobody asked, and you did it anyway. McMaster Engineering’s interview commonly asks about an initiative you took outside the classroom, on a ten-second prep clock, and the same prompt turns up across Kira sets and Queen’s PSE questions.

By the AcceptMe team 7 min read Updated

What the interviewer is listening for

Students hear “initiative” and reach for the biggest thing they have organised, on the theory that scale is the point. It isn’t. The interviewer is not scoring the size of the project. They’re listening for three things:

  • A gap nobody had asked you to fill. Something was missing, broken or slow, and no teacher, boss or parent had assigned it to you. The gap is what makes it initiative rather than a task.
  • The first move, and what it cost. The specific thing you did on day one: the email you sent, the sheet you made, the person you asked. Initiative is measured at the start, not the finish, so the answer needs the start in detail.
  • What happened because you moved. A result, ideally a number, and honesty about whether it stuck. Ideally a number because a first run almost always ends on “and it worked”; “twenty minutes faster per build” or “fifteen students a week by December” lets the interviewer weigh it, and “I did a good job” does not. An initiative that fizzled still counts if the first move was real and you can say why it fizzled.

Any question in this family can be answered with a story that has those three parts. The STAR structure gives you the order.

Three example answers

Example one: a system nobody asked for

I work at a bike shop on weekends, mostly building bikes out of boxes. Last spring I noticed that every build started with fifteen minutes of looking for the right tools, because they lived wherever the last person had put them. Nobody had told me to care about that; the owner had been doing it that way for eleven years. So one Saturday I came in an hour early, laid every tool out on a sheet of cardboard, traced them in marker, and hung it above the bench. It looked ridiculous. The owner laughed at it. Then he timed a build the next week and it was about twenty minutes faster, and he had me make a second board for the repair bench. The thing I would point to is that I did not ask permission, because I was fairly sure the answer would have been “we’ve always done it this way,” and it was a lot easier to show him than to convince him.

Example two: starting something that half worked

In Grade 11 our school had no peer tutoring, and I knew at least four people in my math class who were failing quietly. I asked the guidance office if I could start one and they said yes if I found a room and a teacher to sit in. That took two weeks of asking; the third teacher said yes. I put up posters and got eleven tutors and two students at the first session. Two. I had the ratio backwards. So I stopped advertising to tutors and went to the Grade 9 and 10 math teachers and asked them to name students directly, which is awkward for them, but three of the four did. By December we had about fifteen students a week and six tutors. I would not call it a success exactly, because it ended when I graduated and nobody picked it up. What I learned is that the first version of anything is usually solving the wrong side of the problem, and you only find that out by running it.

Example three: initiative at home

My grandmother moved in with us in Grade 10 and her medications were a mess: seven prescriptions, three pharmacies, and my parents arguing about who had refilled what. Nobody asked me to fix it, because nobody thought of it as fixable, just annoying. I spent an evening making a spreadsheet with every medication, dose, refill date and pharmacy, then called the three pharmacies to ask if they could all be moved to one, which took about forty minutes and it turned out they could. Then I set refill reminders on my mum’s phone, not mine, because I wanted it to work when I was not home. Two years on it still runs. The honest part is that my motive was partly selfish; I wanted the arguments to stop. But I noticed that I was the only one in the house who treated it as a problem with a solution rather than a fact of life, and I have tried to be that person on purpose since.

Story shapes that work

  • The fix nobody asked for. You saw waste or friction, built a small thing, and showed it instead of pitching it. The strongest shape because the gap, the move and the result are all visible. Example one.
  • The start. Something did not exist and you made it exist: a club, a service, a business, a study group. Works if you can name the first two weeks in detail and are honest about how it ended. Example two.
  • The question. You were the one who asked “why do we do it this way?” out loud and then did the work of finding out. Undersold, because it feels small, but a reader knows how rare it is.
  • The unglamorous one. Medications, the family paperwork, the shared drive nobody organised. Readers trust these more than the charity gala, because there was no audience for them. Example three.

The one that quietly backfires

The story that goes: a teacher, coach or manager asked for someone to do X, and I did X, and I did it well. Told as initiative, this puts the interviewer in a bind. The work may have been excellent, but the gap was spotted by someone else, the task was assigned, and what remains is a story about being reliable, which is a different competency. It scores fine as teamwork or diligence and poorly as initiative, and students spend the whole answer not noticing the mismatch.

The tell is the verb in your second sentence. “I was asked to,” “I was chosen to,” “my teacher suggested”: any of those and you are describing a task. That does not mean the story is useless. Often there is initiative buried inside it: the part where the assigned task turned out to be impossible as specified and you changed it without asking. Start the story there. If there is no such part, pick a smaller story with a real gap in it.

A test for any initiative story: who noticed the problem first? If the answer is you, tell it. If the answer is someone else, either find the moment inside the story where you went beyond what they asked, or choose a different story.

Other ways the question gets asked

  • Tell me about an initiative you took outside the classroom.
  • Describe a time you went above and beyond what was expected.
  • Tell me about something you started.
  • Describe a problem you noticed that others had missed. What did you do?
  • Tell me about a time you took charge without being asked.
  • What is something you have taught yourself, and why?

Same story bank, same three parts. The variations shift the emphasis: for “outside the classroom,” job and home stories are exactly what is wanted, so don’t reach for a school project. For “above and beyond,” the gap is the difference between what was asked and what you did, so name what was asked in one sentence and spend the rest on the extra. For “taught yourself,” the first move is the day you decided and the first thing you built. Prepare one story with a clear gap and a clear first move and you can bend it to any of these in a ten-second prep window, which is the length McMaster Engineering gives you.

Where to go from here

Initiative and leadership overlap, and the leadership guide explains where they part: leadership needs other people in the story, initiative only needs a gap. If your best initiative story ended badly, the resilience guide shows how to tell the same story from the second-day angle. If you are convinced you have no material at all, the no-ECs guide pulls initiative stories out of a part-time job, a sibling and a hobby. If the gap and the first move are still fuzzy, build the story first: AcceptMe’s Story Bank coach asks about initiative, has you relate it to something from your job or your house, and keeps nudging on what you did on day one until the outline is in your words; students tend to be surprised how little they need to bring to the first answer. Then put one on a clock: AcceptMe’s custom interviews will ask you an unseen initiative question with a prep window as short as ten seconds, one take, and hand you the transcript with the coach’s notes on whether the gap and the first move were there.

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