What Two Years Of MBA From XLRI Taught Three Graduates About The Two Years Of CAT Preparation Before That

While all post-graduate degrees are about widening your horizons in terms of potential and expertise, we suppose that an MBA degree is what you prefer. It is, if not more, technically and professionally advanced as compared to other programmes.  What we shall do for you, therefore, is give you a trailer of the mad journey that is an MBA college-life through the stories of three survivors - or victors, if you will.

Preetam, Harpreet and Rajat completed their MBA from one of India’s finest b-schools: XLRI Jamshedpur. While we can imagine that life in any b-school is a roller coaster ride in itself, the statement fits best for those in XLRI, as we look into the journey of these alums. But before their extraordinary journey in India’s top b-school, came a period which shaped their future in many ways, that is, the preparation period. Our MBA graduates are ex-CAT prep trainers and students too. They have a cornucopia of advice for aspirants trying to make it into the top business schools across the country and of which we will give you a fleeting glimpse.

Preetam, who obtained an overall CAT percentile of 99.46 and scored 99.88 in XAT, had worked as a developer for about 28 months. What he saw as the key to business operations of technology was the management aspect. In software, he recalls, by the time he started working on the coding part, 60% of the work had already been done, which leaves only so much scope for innovation. Thus he believed that a well-rounded MBA would increase his exposure and give him a meticulous idea about how the whole business functions. Harpreet too, like Preetam, quit his job at IBM to pursue an MBA, in a search for more meaningful and impactful work. However, due to his superior verbal prowess, his coaching institute (TIME) offered him a job to teach Verbal Ability which he did for 2 yrs. He then made it to XLRI with an overall percentile of 99+ in CAT and XAT. Rajat, an IIT Dhanbad graduate who wanted to break the glass ceiling and equip himself with a decision making power that comes with a management degree, scored a 99.5+ percentile in all the top MBA exams like CAT, XAT and IIFT.

All three of them reflecting on their odyssey shared with us their moments of epiphany: when they realized the pointlessness of petty considerations in those early days of preparations or engaging in useless brooding over past academic records, alma mater and whatnot, parameters which they now know were minor issues when put in perspective. After two years in XLRI which put so many variables into the mix, they understood how fruitless those comparisons with peers and performances in mocks were; their biggest and craziest of all revelations being the irrelevance of even the percentiles once inside the college.

The consensus thus was that students bother themselves with too many meagre variables and uncertainties while preparing for MBA entrance exams when the whole game has actually always been about continuous personal development. MBA is truly an application based course. Tricks and tips and petty competitions and rivalries mean little once you are inside a B-school. With this in mind, the three of them armed with their nuanced perspective and technical know-how now want to help others succeed in this quagmire. They are students who went on to become trainers and then graduates from the most esteemed MBA institute of the country, and they plan to offer CAT preparation with a perspective: a preparation that truly prepares you to succeed not only in but beyond CAT/XAT. They are teaming up with Beatest, an ed-tech startup, and are looking for interested aspirants who wish to benefit from their combined expertise.

Beatest is India’s first live-application based learning platform founded by a Jadavpur University (Kolkata) alumnus Sayantan Chatterjee, who himself scored a 99+ percentile in CAT. Beatest offers various technical courses to students that are beyond their college curriculum. The USP of the platform is that it hires trainers from a global community of high-quality mentors who are handpicked from top industries (like Microsoft and Google) and institutions (Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, etc) across the world. Interestingly, the courses offered are not taught the typical way: students have to solve an innovative capstone project and build something from scratch by practically applying the concepts learnt.

Having gone through the entire CAT prep process and recognizing the obstacles that students face, these MBA graduates along with Beatest, are offering a CAT preparation course on the platform itself. Beatest aims at equipping students with quality content from the most reliable sources and helping them out through a personalized approach. The CAT-prep course will comprise authentic mock test papers as well as live interactive sessions with these mentors, who with their prowess and experience shall work the students through the intricacies of the entire preparation process. They will float the course soon and are looking for interested aspirants who truly believe in their hard work irrespective of where they come from and what they had done in the past.

To know more about the course, check out the link to their Facebook group: Beatest CAT Prep 2018