Shreyas is born and brought up in Nashik. He has completed his bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering from the Government College of Engineering Pune (COEP). He has had a consistent academic, co-curricular and extracurricular record. He scored 95.80% in the 10th standard and 86.31 in the 12th standard both from the Maharashtra board. His team was the winner of the national level Mapathon'20 organized by ISRO, IIT Bombay, and AICTE. He is an athlete and has represented his college at university-level competitions. He has a keen interest in the startup ecosystem and was the head of Events and Networking at Pune Startup Fest'20 and was the Core team member at Bhau's Innovation and Entrepreneurship Cell, COEP. He loves to follow geopolitics and discuss its implications with respect to the ongoing world order. Currently, he is working as a sales and operations intern at Interview.io (A startup backed by Kunal Shah (Founder of CRED), Titan Capital, etc.). He has also done a summer internship at PMRDA and was posted on-site for the Pune Metro project.
In this article, Shreyas shared how he prepared for CAT and scored 99.11%ile. Read on!
Q) Please Share Your Score And Percentile With Our Readers.
Overall Score: 98.95 | Overall Percentile: 99.11
VARC | Score: 42.48 | Percentile: 98.46
DILR | Score: 18.30 | Percentile: 87.34
Quants | Score: 38.17 | Percentile: 99.36
Q) Please Share Your Journey In Achieving 99.11%ile in CAT 2021.
My 2 years journey was amazing. I took a few tough decisions in my life during the past 2 years. Each decision made me confident and gave me clarity about the life I wish for myself. I decided to take CAT’20 and prepared hard. On the day of the exam, my PC got hung for the first 10 min in the verbal section and I couldn’t manage that pressure as I had never thought such a thing would happen. I focused on the number of questions in the remaining time instead of keeping calm and focusing on accuracy and scored a mere 53 percentile in the verbal section. I was really sad and thought all the efforts were in vain. I had a campus placement offer from a reputed listed construction company, but I decided not to join the firm as I had got clarity regarding the things I enjoy most and want in life.
It was clear I was more inclined towards the business aspect of things and decided not to join the company. I focused on preparing for CAT’21 but this time around I focused more on the accuracy and basic concept building. The result said it all as I had just one negative mark on the entire CAT'21 paper. I didn't have this high accuracy in any mock that I had taken. But my calm composure on the D-Day helped me achieve it.
I feel I became even more patient in this entire journey, it shaped me to manage pressure situations better, I learned that efforts don’t go in vain if you are enthusiastic about your goal. I also realized that clarity in any aspect helps you reach places that you would have never thought were possible to reach.
Q) Please Share Your Month-Wise Preparation Insights For Upcoming Aspirants.
I started preparing for CAT'21 in June 2021. I had not joined a coaching class as I had already done coaching for CAT'20 from Genesis Mentors Pune. I joined the Quantifiers Booster Course for revision in September 2021. I started my preparation by solving the Quants material. I started solving 1 sudoku, and 2 DILR sets (from Quantifiers DILR book and Elites grid YouTube videos) and solved Cracku daily targets consistently every day.
Verbal ability was my weakest link and I read as much as I could every day for 40-45 minutes from Aeon essays, Al daily, Bharat's reading list, etc. I saw the greatest improvement in my verbal score after reading the Critical reasoning bible for GMAT which is a gem of a resource. My major focus from August was on mocks and mock analysis.
Q) Please Share The Section-Wise Strategies Followed By You During Preparation.
Sectional tests are crucial. I did take more sectionals for DILR and VARC. I gave 1.5-2 hours per section each day. My entire strategy was focused on accuracy in all the sections and in all the sectionals/mocks taken.
Q) Please Talk About The Role Of Mock Tests While Preparing.
Mocks did make me exam ready. I had enrolled for the IMS, TIME, and Cracku test series. I gave around 40 mocks from July to November. I made a detailed excel sheet for the initial 15 mocks to improve my question selection and understand my strengths and weaknesses.
I used to answer the following questions in the excel sheet:
1) Level of Difficulty according to me.
2) Why did I attempt that question?
3) Why did I get it right/wrong?
4) Time taken to solve and avg time taken by others.
5) Could I solve it later without seeing the solutions?
6) What should I have done? (Attempted in the first round, second round/leave, etc.)
The journey was a roller coaster ride but whenever I felt down, I used to go back to my purpose and how an MBA would help me achieve my dreams and start all over again.