I believe that getting a rank of 1189 in IITJEE and getting into IIT Delhi is my single largest achievement so far. It took an immense amount of effort and dedication to achieve this and I had to overcome many obstacles along the way. It took 2 years of hard work and determination, giving 6-hour mock tests every week, dealing with failure and demotivation along the way and competing with over 1,200,000 aspirants.
I started my JEE preparation in 2012. My start was met with some hurdles. I was transferring from a boarding school to come back to Delhi, and there were certain problems with the admission process which led to me losing the initial 2 months of preparation. I joined VMC for my coaching and had to work extra to cover up the syllabus along with managing the current topics that were being covered in the class. This led to me performing poorly in the first set of mock tests. Eventually, I was able to catch up by putting in extra hours, seeking extra help from my teachers and friends. I was giving almost 8 hours to my preparation for JEE apart from school. Eventually, I started performing well and was in the top 3 students in the coaching centre. It felt that I had become obsessed with the exam. It was all that I could think and dream about. There were bouts of nervousness and demotivation, but my parents, friends and teachers helped me to stay focussed and relaxed.
There were other obstacles along the way as well. In February of 2013, I had to undergo surgery for Appendicitis, which caused me to lose around 3 weeks of preparation which led me to fall behind again. But this time I made sure that I would not let it affect my mock test scores.
There were 3 subjects i.e. Physics, Chemistry and Maths and each had over 2 years of worth of material to cover for the exam. The level of questions asked was also much higher than anything taught in schools. There are a ton of concepts to be understood, a lot of formulae to be memorized and mastered and entire books to be memorized in order to crack the exam.
Initially, it felt that Chemistry would be easy and Maths would be difficult as it seemed very abstract. But as time went on, Chemistry started to become tougher as the sheer volume of material to be memorized increased drastically as we moved into Organic and Inorganic Chemistry, while Maths became more logical along the way. Physics was always my strong subject and I always had an edge over my classmates in it.
I remember having solved at least 10 books of questions for each subject and memorized at least 5 books for Chemistry.