The world is filled with motivated individuals, daily striving to overcome challenges and emerge triumphant against all odds. Such people have graced this world in the past and will continue to do so in the future. These people have highly inspirational stories, which would spur others to push through the barriers surrounding them and actively pursue their ambitions.
I do not have such an inspiring story to share, yet, though I can recount my MBA entrance experience, which is something leading up to me following my ambition.
I completed my B. Tech from College of Engineering, Pune, in 2017 and took a one-year gap to prepare for MBA entrances. It was a bad time for my family, financially, as my dad lost his job. It wasn’t the best time for me to take the one-year study break and I should probably have picked up a job from my engineering campus. However, I was sure of the fact that I did not wish to continue in that field and hence, decided to focus on my preparations. I started studying arduously from August 2017 and gave a string of exams, starting from October. The first exam that I gave was CAT, given by 2.5 lakh aspirants in our country. It, being my first entrance exam, got my nerves all wrecked and as a result, I scored much lower than the cut-off for all the institutes I desired to get into. However, I’d gotten a taste of the management entrance exams and was more confident for the subsequent ones, such as SNAP, the entrance exam for Symbiosis, and IIFT, both of which were scheduled in December, 2017. I did not get a satisfactory score in either of them and felt my morale drop. Next up was XAT, the entrance exam for XLRI, for which I had no motivation to appear. However, my mom advised me to appear for it just bear the experience and so, I did. Surprisingly, with the reputed difficulty of the examination in mind, I did fairly well in it, but just missed one sectional cut-off by a few marks. Nevertheless, the examination had restored my confidence, which was vital at that point in time. I had only one option left and that was the CET, conducted in March 2018. It was my last shot and represented a do-or-die situation for me. I gave the exam my everything and spent more than 2 months, practising and taking up mock tests, every day. As a result, I ranked 63 out of close to one lakh applicants and secured a seat in the second-best college in Mahashtra, under the DTE.
Though my story is far from over, this was an experience that shall always remain close to my heart and motivate me to pursue my ambitions.