Moderately paced, steady, and bang on target!!

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Well that's how I'd sum up my progress in my first (and fortunately, only) attempt at CAT. Without any background or knowledge whatsoever about Management, I'd decided to take the plunge. And a blind plunge it was.

I had started in July with an attempt at CAT 2006 (Dunno why? But still...), started joining online forums and contacting remote friends for advice. I realized I was really miserable at quant, and focussed on quant itself for the month. I started with Arun Sharma, and pretty soon I was sitting for hours solving exercises. I'd spend up to an hour on some LOD III problems, (no other respite!) and still hope to get somewhere...

In august I started scouting for help, and in the course, joined the TIME aimcat series and a revision series with Munira Lokhandwala. The actual number of fundae in CAT are quite few, and even in the revision series, I think pretty much everything was covered. In the months of August and September, I focused a lot on solving section tests, and in my test taking abilities. The most important lesson here was to program myself to leave a question in 30secs/1 min if I could not reach a solution.

September and October were again spent in taking a lot of mocks. I'd borrowed papers from IMS, CL, CF, and PT practically everywhere and used to solve some 2-3 mocks every week. The important point was comparing my attempts with the 'easy' questions as listed in the keys to the mock. I was very active on Pagalguy, constantly keeping myself updated on AIMCAT's and CL mocks.

The last 3 weeks were spent solving quant and DI Topicwise from old TIME papers. The key here was solving in a group, as even if one of us got the answer, we could see the approach and rapidly move ahead.

Another important point I'd like to highlight here is the effect that the mock tests had on my confidence levels. Getting a top 100 rank almost every time and comparing my attempts with other scorers made me more and surer of my strengths and weaknesses in handling the CAT. In the end, it’s the confidence that you have in yourself that enables you to perform your best…

A Summary of my results…

XAT....Big time flop, scored 60 percentile in quant!

NMAT.....finally selected, merit no 121

IIFT....waitlisted
FMS....Converted MBA (MS) Paid and then withdrew fees

MH MBA CET....99.83 percentile (after 3 Back to Back GDPI’s and some travelling)
SNAP..... All India written Topper, selected in SIBM.

CAT.....99.90 percentile, converted MDI.
IIM’s (Separate from CAT yaar, all important!) Converted AHMEDABAD,
Calcutta, Indore, Kozhikode, Waitlist 152@ Lucknow

Moral of the story....No matter how many calls U convert, U are as good as the best college U converted. Cheers and best of luck!

Dinesh

IIM – Ahmedabad