Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

- Dreams, Langston Hughes

I am Rudrani Bose, I studied English Literature from Jadavpur University and I’m a fresher. Getting into XLRI Jamshedpur BM still feels so surreal at times that I have to keep asking myself if it is really true. I remember that reading that poem in college and wanting, desperately, for my dreams to come true.

The Preparation

I have always been someone who loves to read a lot, so VARC was something I was naturally good at. LRDI improved with practice. Now when it comes to quant, although I had been very good at it in school, I had not taken maths beyond class 10 , so by the time I started preparing for CAT and XAT, it had been five years since I had lost touch with the subject, and it required quite a bit of brushing up. At the BM interview, I was asked if it was difficult to get in touch with maths again, and I will answer what I said then, yes, it was exceedingly difficult and quite a shock at first, and especially, since I had been a very good student throughout school and college, it was at first,tough, to see exactly how far I was lagging behind if I wanted to perform well. Yet once you choose a way, you must see it till the end and there is little that determination and hard work will not accomplish.

I remember giving the exam and thinking that it had gone well, though I was not exactly sure how well. But when the results came out, the 99.45 percentile was definitely beyond my expectations and I was in shock for quite some time.

The Interview and the Result

I had applied only to the IIMs and XLRI and gave interviews for both BM

and HR as well as all the IIMs barring ABC and converted IIM-L, IIM-I PGP AND PGP- HRM and CAP apart from XLRI BM. Current Affairs was an important factor in almost every interview, I would really emphasise reading up on the events of at least the last 6-8 months and noting down relevant statistics for future use, I read The Hindu and Indian Express, especially the editorials, along with following a couple of current affairs websites. It takes time, but helps immensely, especially in the GD at XL, to formulate alternative viewpoints.

My interview for BM was really diverse, ranging from being asked to give a real-life example of the theory of a course I had studied in undergrad, to the importance of psychology and sociology in an MBA, from the social impact I wished to achieve to an ethical dilemma. Like in the case of most interviews, I could not be exactly sure of how it had gone, but I remember thinking to myself, as I walked towards the gates of the campus, that it had been one of the most interesting 35-40 minutes of my life, and as the midnight of the 20th of May proved, as the “Congratulations!!! You are selected for Jamshedpur BM Program” came up on my screen, I realised, those had also probably been some of the best and luckiest 35 minutes of my life.

I hardly slept that night, but it was a night different from the other innumerable sleepless nights I had spent, studying, worrying and waiting. A favourite quote of mine is from Dr. A.P.J Abdul Kalam’s book, My Journey: Transforming Dreams Into Actions, where he writes, “dreams are not those that we see in our sleep, they should be the ones that never let us sleep”, and I would like to believe, that on the night of the 20th, a small part of that was achieved.

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Hold Fast To Dreams: A Literature Student Making It To XLRI Jamshedpur BM