To give you a little background of me: I’m Nishi Agrawal. I belong to a small town in Chhattisgarh called Pathalgaon. I have done my early schooling there and hence I’m not a student of schools with big names. But I have done my Under Graduation from a reputed college and now going to pursue my Post Graduation from one of the most prestigious B schools in the country.
All this has been possible because of my dedication to what I plan to do without thinking about the results. I believe in doing my work and improving myself regularly. This thought always kept me calm and focused at the right place.
When I gave my 1st CAT attempt in 2017 without proper preparation, I realized VARC is my biggest weakness. I couldn’t even clear its sectional cut-off. In 2018, I couldn’t focus on CAT again because of my new job. I didn’t clear the sectional cut off for VARC that year too. After much introspection, I realized the reason was my slow reading speed.
I realized I need to be sincere if I want to do this. So when I decided to attempt CAT’19, I knew I will have to put a lot of extra effort into VARC. Thanks to my teacher
Krishna Sir who was always there for my complete preparation journey. He always had one word to tell me “READ”. I was scolded from time to time by him to read 15 articles a day i.e. approximately 10,000 words. I will transfer that suggestion to you. If you are someone who is scared of VARC, go and “
READ”. It will not just help you increase your reading speed but will also help understand RCs better.
After reading, the next most important thing for VARC was to give mocks and analyze them properly. It is very important that you give a lot of time to analyze what is going wrong. After attempting mocks, I used to set the timer and solve unsolved questions during analysis. It is also very important to know which type of questions you are getting wrong. Set the right approach for them. Reach out to teachers, check webinars, and find out which approach suits best for you. If you are struggling to remember the content of RC, try paragraph to question approach where you read 1 or 2 paragraphs and then solve questions related to that and so on. But all these need time so if your weak point is VARC, there is no time to waste.
Next comes LRDI where I scored my highest percentile i.e. 99.81. But if you ask me how? I will give the usual answer i.e. “Practice”. Solve 3 to 4 sets regularly.
Don’t think you always need new sets to solve. Because even after solving the same set before, you might not be able to solve it next time or end up wasting a
lot of time. Do observe the method of writing the data, it makes a hell lot of difference. Focus more on the sets given in mocks. I solved them multiple times.
For
Quant, I would say find out the topics which don’t fetch you marks. Practice their questions. Focus on important topics like Geometry. A little theory and practice will definitely set the right path for you.
To give you the most effective suggestion in one line “
Analyse as many mocks as possible”. I have written analyze because that’s where you learn the most after attempting mocks. I gave around 60 mocks and not missed analyzing even a single mock. Give at least 1 mock every week and you can gradually increase the frequency as you come closer to the D-day.
I would also suggest you have a go-to person for every section if possible. I had one for each section and it helped me a lot.
Also, never get disappointed when mocks don’t go well. Go out, have some nice food and enjoy it. After that start fresh and give your best. Even I struggled with
first 40 mocks to clear the cut-off in VARC but still, I never gave up.
For
XAT specifically, I just solved some previous year papers and mainly focused on Decision making. I researched a lot of tricks and tips for it. I tried implementing those in past year papers. Rest it was all the preparation of CAT which helped me.
I got calls from IIMC, IIML, IIMI, IIMK, XLRI, FMS, MDI, and all new and baby IIMs. I’m joining IIML, popularly known as “
HelL”.
Don’t be Serious, Be Sincere, and Enjoy this process of learning.
Wish You All the best!!
You can always reach out to me
via LinkedIn.
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