You have been working hard for the last god knows how many months juggling between work/studies/relationship goals etc. You have gone through enough DI/LR/Quant/Verbal to start your own coaching institute. Your parents have probably forgotten that you exist. Now it’s only 30 days before the big finale – so what do you do?
Know thyself – It’s important to get a reality check on the situation. What are your strong points and where are you lacking? How much can you realistically clear in the sectional cutoffs? Not everyone is your dream B-School will be a math wizard or a walking-talking grammar book – they just played their strengths and tried to minimize the damage on their weaknesses. If you are weak on circles and trigonometry, then maybe you can focus on making sure you make zero errors in your strong areas like profit and loss. It’s also important to understand your schedule and align your subjects accordingly, if math makes you sleepy, do it in the morning and then move on to logical reasoning and verbal.
Give A LOT of mocks – We can’t stress this enough. Mocks help become prepared for the exam. You might know how to find out whether Rajnikanth can outrun a train going at 100 km per hour (trick question: YES HE CAN) but if you can’t solve it within the time Rajnikanth can solve that question (after reaching that train) you can mark 2019 as another year of preparation. What helps most students is solving mocks and analyzing it to find your strong or weak points. These days a lot of websites provide a breakup of where you have lost marks… Take it very seriously. Take time to analyze your performance and even try to create an excel sheet which shows your performance. Data is power and the beat the game, you need all the power you can get.
Read ok please – If you haven’t already started, reading is important. The psychological block of having long winding sentences and then pointless questions thrown at you (Question: What is the tone of the passage? Hint: boring) can only be overcome if you have a practice of reading. Pick up a newspaper like the Indian Express and start going through the articles. Try to summarize the article mentally in the end to see your grasp of the subject matter. If you fall asleep initially that’s okay, it’s a gradual process. But keep at it. Try to have diverse sources to read from – English passages often come from Science, Business, Economics, Philosophy and the like. Imagine if you get an article on CRISPER technology? It’s better sometimes to know a little about such topics before-hand otherwise the interpreting the passage will bring about the twin disadvantage of having to first understand the subject material and then having to understand the passage.
The curse of GK – GK is a make or break section in many entrance exams like SNAP, XAT. Usually, for candidates, it breaks them. While no great manager ever made a profit knowing the capital of Argentina, it doesn’t hurt to know to become a manager in the first place. Newspapers come to the rescue again, reading newspapers like the Economic Times helped build a strong GK base while newspapers like The Indian Express keep one abreast with the latest news. In a paper like SNAP, this much reading is more than sufficient. Usually, people keep GK to the last minute, so it is our humble request that makes sure you are not cramming the names of all previous prime ministers two hours before the exam. Keep at least an hour a day just for GK and make to revise your points.
These are our tips. We wish you luck with your last 30 days. This might be a cliché ending but don’t stress out. Think about it this way, you just need one of the thousand-plus seats available at top MBA institutes. The competition is full of people who are as scared, nervous and confused as you. No MBA graduate is giving the entrance exam, it is simply frustrated engineers who think this might improve their employability.
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