The biggest challenge that I've faced and overcome would be cracking CAT and getting into a top B-School like MDI. I am an Engineering graduate and with that tag comes an expectation of being good at mathematics. My case was the opposite. I was really good at verbal and equally bad at Quant. I was so bad that I was the last one in every Quant test ranking. People made fun of me and I was told I was too low on aptitude to make it to any decent B-School.
Despite all the demotivation from people around me, I kept working on my aptitude in silence. Lost hope many times, lost motivation after tests that went bad, also thought of quitting a couple of times, but kept picking myself up and continued working.
I hadn’t been good enough even at my engineering, so this was my only chance at redemption. My father had already invested a lot in me and this was my turn to prove myself to him.
Then came the day of CAT. Coming out of the exam hall , I was disappointed. I believed I had goofed up and the dream was lost.
But then, the results came out. I had scored beyond my expectations. A decent enough percentile you'd call it. And most importantly, scored past the 80 mark in quant. From a 50-60 to an 80+ has been my journey of overcoming the odds.
And then eventually got into a premiere B-school like MDI. Mountain conquered. :)
It wouldn't be wrong if one said Aditya Birla Group is omnipresent in our lives. From fashion to banking and chemicals to infrastructural materials, ABG is root-deep woven into the economical fabric of India. It would actually be a shame to limit our acknowledgement of the ABG brands to just India. A $44 billion corporation, it has set business standards across the globe.
Being the third-largest Indian private sector conglomerate with over 40 brands to its name, ABG products and services touch our lives every day. It happened to touch my life too, in a big way actually.
I was on a 7-day trek in the Himalayas to a place called Chanderkhani with 3 of my cousins. Including other people we were a group of 20-25 people. On the 6th day of the trek we were at a height of around 10,000 feet. It was a long trail and I stopped somewhere to take a photograph. I spent so much time taking the photo that I didn’t realize the rest of the group had left. There was no one to be seen anywhere around. I felt my knees weaken and my pulse dropping. I had literally no one in sight and just vast stretches of white snow. Our phones had no connectivity and we had switched them off to save battery. I walked for a while and still couldn’t find any one. Fear started to strike and I started loosing my calm. And then a thought struck me and with a glimmer of hope I switched on my mobile phone. ABG in such a desperate situation came to my rescue. I had an Idea sim and it had one bar of network even at 10,000 feet. I was so relieved. I called authorities on the ground and after waiting for a few hours someone finally came to my rescue. Had it not been for Idea and hence ABG, I don’ know what I would have done.