How I Secured 99.67%ile CAT Along With A Full-Time Job - Naman Shah

Why MBA was never the question, it was always about when. 

In 2021, I graduated from NIT Warangal, where I pursued metallurgical and materials engineering. The core of this branch was never my strong suit and I’d identified this early on in my college life, which is why I always tried exposing myself to the world beyond the academics and curriculum of college life. I figured out that business management is something that hits the right note for me, and that’s something I wanted to pursue. However, I did not much like the idea of pursuing an MBA immediately after graduation. For one, I wanted to have some experience of the corporate world and wanted to witness how things worked on the field.

Thus, I started my corporate journey as a business development manager at Ofbusiness, which is an industrial raw material aggregation and financing unicorn. Here, at ofbusiness I got an exciting opportunity to work in the rapidly growing agri vertical, where I worked with some of the biggest brands in the food and agribusiness industry, sourcing raw materials, trading bulk agri commodities and even conceptualizing new products. I soon started gravitating towards sales & supply chain management and my conviction of pursuing an MBA grew stronger by the day.

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An experience of 2-3 years is usually the sweet spot for working professionals to pursue a full time MBA and that was the case with me as well, so I decided to take up the CAT ‘22 exam.

Here, I must emphasize on the fact that I started the preparation almost a year prior to the exam. This gave me a good head start. During the initial days, my major focus was to understand the pattern of the exam and the outlines of each of the three sections. Usually there’s this notion that engineers are good in QA & DILR while they lag a bit in VARC, however, for me it was the opposite.

Although the topics in the QA section were well known, my main focus in this section for the first three months was to brush up all the relevant topics in each chapter and solve an adequate number of questions. For this I followed Arun Sharma’s, “How to prepare for Quantitative Aptitude”. This book is a must have resource for all the CAT aspirants.

I gave my first mock test in late April, it was one of those free mocks conducted by Unacademy. It went horrible, I hardly scored 40 out of 198. I don’t think I have ever been so disappointed with my performance. It felt like my last four months of preparation had gone for a toss. It was around this time, when I was also considering taking up a coaching class. I was not very sure about joining any classes, because I used to feel that I already knew many concepts and I doubted if coaching would help me in any way further. Then after a couple of more failed attempts at writing mocks, I realized : knowing a concept and solving a problem based on that concept in an examination setting are two different things. And, after much deliberation, I joined an offline batch at TIME.

I was already four weeks late to the batch I had joined, but my earlier self prep helped me in covering that gap. After attending classes for two to three weeks, I started noticing changes in my problem solving approach, especially in the QA section. The ma’am who used to teach us had a very unique way of teaching. She used to say, “don’t use pen and paper until absolutely necessary. All the menial calculations do it in your mind.” It takes time to build that habit, but it was very genuine advice which helped me save a lot of time in solving problems.

I started TIME’s mock test series, AIMCAT, in May. There used to be a time frame from saturday to wednesday, when the test was live and I made it a habit to write it on either tuesday or wednesday from 7-9 in the morning. Why? - the results & analysis were declared on Thursday and you could only analyze if you remembered your approach, which if I wrote before Tuesday, I knew I would forget. And analyzing your mock tests is a sure shot way of identifying your mistakes and improving your chances of acing it on the D Day. One of my best AIMCAT was sometime in June, after which there were many ups and downs (refer chart) but my strategy of never taking the test results to heart, led me to finally securing 99.67% percentile in my very first attempt.

First and foremost, it's very important to identify your forte. Once identified, try to focus on making that section your strongest pillar, which you can rely upon. For me that was VARC. It was a part of my everyday routine. QA & DILR, I did alternatively, building on my strengths and focusing on my weaker zones to improve.

For VARC, I used TIME’s resource for practicing RCs. I would do at least 2-3 RCs a day, alongside a couple of exercises of either a para summary/ para jumble/ odd one out. I read articles from Aeon, Atlantic, Nautilus, Psyche among others and for news I followed The Ken. (An advice which I would like to give to anyone looking to improve their VARC score is to genuinely enjoy reading whatever you’re reading). These resources coupled with good guidance from TIME’s faculty helped me in achieving 99.07 percentile in this section.

DILR, was my Achilles heel. I had not been putting enough effort into that and I realized in my mocks that this was one of the bottlenecks. I practiced almost all the sets from the TIME resources, daily handouts and sectional tests, yet, I didn’t feel much confident, until I started following Rajesh sir from 2IIM. His way of approaching the problems and literally breaking down complex sets into a bunch of smaller problems, like Royal Stags’ small milate jao, large banate jao, helped me develop that ability to think in a structured manner. With consistent practice, I conquered my fear and managed to score 98.91 percentile in this section.

QA was the section, in which I practiced the most. I would practice regularly from TIMEs modules and handouts.  At the same time it was also the section in which I committed the gravest mistakes during mocks. Things like wrong calculations, wrong formulas, misinterpreting what was asked, and hundreds of such mistakes, which required a little bit more focus and concentrated effort to excel. The trick, I realized, is to maintain a fine balance between speed and accuracy. You neither want to attempt too few questions with 100% accuracy, nor too many questions with very little accuracy. I developed a crystal clear understanding of what kind of questions I would definitely leave. So you need to decide for yourself what you're leaving and not waste a minute of your precious time on that. These are a few steps coupled with some mistakes on the D day, which made me secure a 98.39 percentile in this section.

During the last leg of my preparation, I took a one month sabbatical from work. That was really necessary. In those 26 days of November, my main focus was solving previous year papers from the 2IIM website in a stipulated time frame. That helped me in revising all my concepts and also prepared me to sit for two hours without distraction regularly. I would start early, study till noon, have lunch and take an afternoon nap, wake up and again study till evening, post which I went on a walk or a run to gather my thoughts and maintain my composure.

Sometimes, knowing what not to do is more important than knowing what to do, so here are my 2 cents on what to definitely not do :

• Don’t miss mock tests: Be it in your coaching or any test series you follow, you’ll never be 100% prepared. So try attempting it when it’s live.
• Don’t take test scores to heart: Somedays would be good, some would be terrible, what’s important is that you focus on the rationale behind your solutions & not the outcome.
• Don’t imagine “what if it goes bad”: It won’t be the end of the world. Thinking about what’s beyond our control puts unnecessary pressure, which should be avoided.
• Don’t be random in your approach: Form a roadmap and stick to it as much as you can. Sure, there will be deviations, but better to be slightly deviated than to be arbitrary.

The first step in the direction of your dream B school is definitely acing the CAT exam, but the journey just begins there. Once the CAT results are declared, the period of restlessness and anxiety kicks in as you await your interview calls. After the exam, I channeled my entire energy towards my work, building connections and putting in the extra effort. At this point, if you’re a working professional, it’s equally important to focus on your work, to know inside out about your organization, its financials and the entire ecosystem in which your company operates, it’s going to be a very important segment in your interviews.

The days leading to the WAT-PI are transformational, they make you so much more aware about all the things happening around you and across the globe. I started following world affairs in much depth, reading news articles, and editorials more mindfully, focussing not just on the data but also on the repercussions of so and so events. My sources of information included news portals such as The Ken, ET Money, The Hindu, etc, & YT channels such as ThinkSchool, Firstpost, InsideIIM, etc. It's also a time for self-reflection and introspection for you to prepare for the challenging behavioral interview questions, for nobody knows you better than yourself.

The interview season was like a deserted road for me as I didn’t have many interviews lined up. Among the BLACKI+S, I only had an interview call from IIM Bangalore. Apart from that it was FMS, NITIE, CAP and a few IITs.

Incidentally, Bangalore was my first interview. To my surprise, that interview went thoroughly well. It constituted a panel of three professors, who were very keen to know about me, my experience, my growing years and my long term goals. It felt like having a very mature conversation. It mostly revolved around my Statement of Purpose (SOP), going in depth about my work experience, things I did in college and learnings from my family business. Towards the end of the interview, there were certain questions related to business ethics, for which I gave an honest opinion of what I felt and they seemed a tad bit convinced.

I awaited the selection call with baited breath. The final results came after more than two months from the interview date, but it was worth the wait. It was around 8 in the evening & I was on a call with a client, when I randomly opened Gmail, (as I did for the past 3-4 months checking mails every half an hour or so), a mail from IIM Bangalore popped up, which read, “Congratulations, IIM B is pleased to offer you admission to the PGP’25”.

Now, as I go back to being a student again, after two years for the next two years, as I wait for the final few weeks to pass before another chapter of life begins, I feel excited and overwhelmed to discover what lies ahead.

To all the CAT aspirants and future business leaders, a piece of advice from my side would be to go the extra mile and embrace the challenge.

Wish you all the luck for the exam and your future endeavors!