Throughout my school and college, I have been an achiever in academics and extra-curricular activities. Any competition or exam conducted within and outside my institution would have my name in the list of prize winners. Hence, I grew up thinking success was within my reach always. I was ambitious, diligent and extremely determined to achieve my goals. After my graduation in engineering, I decided to pursue a management degree and started preparing for my MBA exams. I had six months before all my exams and hence decided to devote my entire time to the preparation. I worked hard for 8 hours a day and expected to come out with flying colors as usual. But I was shocked when I saw my test scores. I had performed abysmally in all my exams (CAT, IIFT, and XAT).Unable to bear the brunt of such a failure, I plummeted into depression. I felt the world weighing heavily upon me.
One day, I got up and told myself, “Come what may, I am going to reflect on all the factors that went wrong and rectify it”. It was hard to get back up, but that that’s how life goes on, right? Upon introspection, I found out what had gripped me - the anxiety arousing from fear of failure. I realized as I was on a gap year, the pressure of having to make it to a top tier institute was more important than the preparation process. The fear of having to be answerable to me and the people around me developed anxiety in me. Due to such a self-imposed internal turmoil, I invested hours and hours of aimless preparation which was unplanned, done with immense fear and laden with a lot of fear-induced stress. Such a pessimistic attitude ultimately resulted in unproductive learning. But don’t they say, life often gives you a second chance, isn’t it?
I still had one more exam to go with three weeks of preparation time. I was going to give this exam for the second time as I flunked the first attempt. These three weeks were the most important in all 22 years of my life. I completely channelized my energy towards remaining positive at all costs. I did breathing exercises to suppress my fears and remain composed. I reinforced positive thoughts in me by speaking to myself about how blessed I was and that I was courageous enough to tackle all challenges in life. More importantly, I dreamt of a remote possibility of still acquiring the coveted B-School seat. More than the preparation, I focused on realigning my thoughts towards positivity. I scraped through the exam, scoring just two marks above the cut off. I accepted my low score was due to those unproductive learning hours, but nevertheless, my positivity helped me to just scrape through. Then again, people told me that I would never be able to convert the call owing to my low scores. Unabashed by all those comments, I worked diligently day and night just to convert the only B-School call I had. I successfully converted it and here I am, at NMIMS MUMBAI, gently swimming through the troughs and tides of the B-School rigor. Life to me has always been a learning curve, for nothing can ever groom you like experiences. I believe, every experience would only take us one step towards becoming wholesome humans. If I ever travel back through time, I wouldn’t change a single second of my life.