How do you handle feedback or criticism?

Start by framing feedback as a learning accelerator, not a judgment. Then jump into a specific example. For instance, you might say: I see feedback as the fastest way to improve—it gives me someone else's experience in a few minutes instead of learning through my own mistakes over months. A good example from my capstone project: I submitted a pull request for a REST endpoint that fetched user orders. My teammate reviewed it and said my method was doing too much—querying the database, filtering, formatting DTOs, and handling errors all in one sixty-line method. Honestly, my first thought was 'but it works fine, why does it matter'. But I asked him to explain. He showed me it violated single responsibility and made testing nearly impossible. I refactored it into four smaller methods—one for fetching, one for filtering, one for mapping to DTOs, each with its own unit test. When I added pagination a week later, I only touched the fetching method instead of rewriting everything. That taught me code review feedback isn't about right or wrong—it's about learning design principles I haven't internalized yet. Now I actively ask for feedback on my pull requests and implement suggestions quickly. The key is: share a real example where feedback challenged your thinking, describe how you processed it without getting defensive, and show concrete improvements you made as a result. Keep it under ninety seconds. The goal is to prove you're genuinely coachable in practice, not just someone who claims to love feedback without evidence.