Shashwat Awasthi is joining IIM Calcutta for their MBA batch of 2022-24. He is born and brought up in Lucknow and has done is 10th with 94.83% in ICSE and 95.50% in ISC from City Montessori School, Lucknow. He is a fresher and completed this Engineering in Computer Science and Engineering from NIT Raipur with a grade of 96.70%. He made it to IIM C in his maiden attempt. In this article, he has shared his preparation strategy, and how he went against all odds to make it to IIM Calcutta - from being in ICU due to COVID-19 and then getting dengue two weeks prior to CAT 2021. Read on to know his inspiring story!
Q) Please Share Your Score And Percentile With Our Readers.
Overall Score 118.35, 99.83%ile | VARC 40.05, 97.73%ile, DILR 27.01, 96.10%ile and QA 51.29, 99.94%ile
Q) Please Share Your Journey In Achieving The Mentioned Percentile.
'A journey of miles starts from a single step'. During my third year of Engineering, I scrolled a lot of competition websites like D2C. One day, I saw a case study competition from a top B-School and participated in it just for the experience. Though I was not able to solve anything, this fueled my interest in such competitions, and started taking part in a lot of them. It was then that I decided to do an MBA. As a fresher, many told me to get an experience and then come, but I always thought if I do it now, I would be able to take corporate experience after the MBA and absorb it well. I took guidance from my seniors, who were already in a B-School, and enrolled in local coaching near my college. I never knew my health was going to be my biggest hurdle in this journey. I started my prep in January, and just when I was going to cover my basics, I caught Covid-19 in April. It was not just a home isolation thing, my condition became so critical that I had to be hospitalized in an ICU for 15 days. The recovery part was even worse. I was not able to study anything in the next 2.5-2 months and lost all that I had studied initially. I started again and gave mocks just to have severe dengue just 2 weeks before the Cat Exam day. I lost all my hope and felt this was the end of my aspirations to go to a top B-School. Luckily, I recovered and had just 1 week before the exam. I gave 2 mocks a day for the next 7 days to try to gain all that I lost in the last week. I went to the D-Day, nervous and tense, after listening to all those analyses for the past 2 slots. I realized I have waited for this day for 11 months and now it has come. I need to give the best I have. Now when I look back, I think that was the best thought which could have crossed my mind on the D-Day. I would like to tell the test takers that do not to panic during the paper if they are not able to solve a question or if it is difficult. 'If a section or question is tough for you, it will be for others too. If it is easy for you, it will be for others too'. Thus try to maximize your efforts. The lowest point, as I said, was when I lost 3 months due to Covid.
Q) Please Share Your Month-Wise Preparation Insights For Upcoming Aspirants.
I started my prep in January 2021. In the initial 3 months, I completed my basics and tried to strengthen them. For the next 3 months, I was able to do nothing due to my health. From mid-July, I had this task to revise what I initially learned and also jump to mocks. These months of July and August became very crucial for me due to this. After August, I just gave mocks and analyzed them, and worked on my weaknesses.
Q) Please Share The Section-Wise Strategies Followed By You During Preparation.
I feel yes, sectionals are very important. Though they do not give you the mock feeling, as you do not feel the pressure of other sections on you, they help in boosting your confidence and your set of questions. I gave a sectional whenever I felt a little underconfident in a section or felt it difficult to practice more questions. I had no fixed time to give to each section, I made it a habit to study each section every day and do a little more effort if any of them felt weak.
Q) Please Talk About The Role Of Mock Tests While Preparing.
I started giving mocks regularly in July. I took 3 mock test series from IMS, TIME, and Test Funda. I gave 60 mocks in a span of close to 4 months. For the analysis part, I used to apply different strategies for different sections. For VARC, I used to read the paragraphs again and tried solving questions and comparing my approach to the approach used in the solution. This helped me analyze my mistakes as well as have different solution approaches to the same questions. In DILR, I used to solve the sets I got wrong again and read the solutions to the correct ones, so as to get a jist of all approaches. For Quant, I used to maintain a formula book and tried to solve wrong questions. For the questions I wasn't able to, I wrote down the approach or formula in the notebook. Sometimes my mock scores went as low as 80%iles with negative sectionals. At such a time, the role of my family and mentors came up. Having both parents as teachers, I was able to discuss my strategies with my parents as well as my mentors, to get their perspective on what could be done. The irony was my sections with low scores kept on changing. Towards the last month, I gave 2-3 mocks per week, with 2 a day during the last week. I always told myself 'If a section or question is tough for you, it will be for others too. If it is easy for you, it will be for others too' and this helped me deal with surprises. I always gave 2 hr mocks so no surprises in terms of timespan. :P
CAT Notification is released, Now is the time you take your preparation seriously and go the extra mile. To aid CAT aspirants, we have compiled a few sectional tests as a giveaway. Take them now and see how your accuracy turns out!