How to answer 'tell me about yourself' in an interview

CCollege interviewers, as readers in Stanford's admissions office understood them, open nearly every conversation with the same invitation: tell me about yourself. Students hear it as permission to relax, and they start with their family, their town or their summer. The advice families usually give, just be yourself, makes this worse. Readers in that office considered that advice as wrong for interviews as it is for essays, because the open question is far less open than it sounds. A student who misreads it spends the most valuable minutes of the interview on material the interviewer is unlikely to carry into the report, and never gets back to what the college actually wanted to hear.