Around a year into my job as an SDE, I realised that I wasn't too satisfied in my role as a software developer. I felt a little constrained in my role with respect to my involvement in decisions such as the direction that the product should be taken in, the features to be implemented next, customer/client involvement, etc. and wanted to move to a role where I could be more involved in these decisions.
This led me to pursue the role of a Product Manager since that would give me an opportunity to align my work closer to my interests. On talking to people and reading up more about the role, I realised that you could move to such a role with or without an MBA, however, I decided to go via the MBA route as that would give me more exposure to the all-round business aspects that I didn't have much of an idea about as an engineer and would also give me easier access to this role in companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, etc.
By the time I came to this decision, it was already mid-August 2021, with approximately 3 months to go for CAT. I tried a couple of online classes from the popular coaching institutes, however, I personally didn't find them too useful, as a larger batch size generally meant that the class often got stuck on areas/topics where you might already have clarity, and I had limited time to spend on my preparation due to my job. Hence, I went via the self-study route since I felt that this allowed me to utilise my time spent on the CAT prep more efficiently. I went ahead and bought the study materials from the popular coaching institutes, their exam series and got started with my prep.
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I tried to take out at least an hour or two during the weekdays, while during the weekends I spent around 6–8 hours with my prep. However, due to the limited time and lack of consistency, I could only score a 94.59%ile. Although the attempt still helped me get a good feel of the exam. In the coming year, I initially spent some time building up my CV through the period January–April 2022 and took some time off to relax for a bit so that I could get started with my prep for the next CAT refreshed and rejuvenated. And I was able to finally score a 99.01% ile in my second attempt in 2022.
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Two main things that I realised over this period are the following :
1) The improvements you see once you start preparing are not a straight line but more like a step graph, it could sometimes be even a month or two where you don't see any improvement and then you suddenly see a huge jump in your mock test scores.
2) Consistency more than anything is required for scoring a good percentile in CAT, so it's helpful if you can find a reason why you want to do an MBA since it helps you keep going when you feel like slacking off.
However, being a GEM(General Engineering Male) with previous acads of : X - 91%, XII - 96.2%, Grad - 71.80%, and with 30 months of job experience, I still failed to get a call from the BLACKI IIM's, although did manage to get calls for SPJIMR IM specialisation and MDI-G PGDM and PGDM IB which were also amongst the colleges I was aiming for and got started with my prep for the interview rounds.
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I first started out with speaking to as many mentors/seniors as possible to hear about their interview experiences, went through the interview experiences on quora and other such sites to get a feel of what sort of questions are asked. From what I could perceive, you could get questions from just about anywhere, depending on your luck. Since I didn't have a lot of interviews, I knew I needed to cover all bases since I didn't know what sort of panellist I might get and in what mood they might be in on that day. I spent time covering topics from the following areas : job-related questions, tech related news since I was aspiring for a Product Management role, read up about basics of a Product Management role, current affairs, expected interview questions on a couple of engineering subjects, previous interview questions for those colleges, went extensively through their websites to see what set these colleges apart and HR/personality questions). Along with this, I attended 10+ mock interviews, some 1-1 and some GI's (Group Interviews) since SPJIMR has 2 rounds of interviews, both of which are GI's.
The first GI round was online and consisted of 2 panellists and 4 aspirants, including me. I was asked questions around the following : tell me about yourself, about my role as an SDE, contributions made during my period as a scrum master, Agile vs Waterfall, usage of tech in marketing, questions on Data Analytics, AI/ML and surprisingly, a question on my opinion on the topic of "technological singularity" and what I would do to prevent a rouge AI/robotic uprising (what helped me here was the fact I am a movie afficionado and spoke about things from the movies like "Transcendence" and "I, Robot").
I was able to qualify in the first round and then appeared for my GI-2, which was an in-person round at the SPJIMR campus in Mumbai around 10 days later. This consisted of a WAT round and another group interview, which mostly revovles around ethical dilemma questions/case studies since SPJIMR gives quite some importance to social sensitivity and ethics. My WAT topic was "Impact of China's Zero COVID Policy on the World Economy", following which I appeared for my GI-2. The questions in GI-2 consisted of a couple of ethical case studies, my take on a couple of current affairs, and some personality-based questions.
I was able to convert both my calls from MDI and SPJIMR and get direct admission to both colleges. However, based on my aspirations and the opportunities offered, I decided to join SPJIMR!
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