CAT Is Not Only About Aptitude But Also About Time Management - IIM Bangalore Student
''Better Late Than Never''
''Better Late Than Never''
Things happen at a much faster pace in b-school than I’ve ever imagined. There lies an element of surprise that you can’t get away with but can only try getting hold of it. Be it the surprise quizzes (by the time we were still surprised over our first quiz, came the second quiz), impromptu events and what not. Besides juggling between assignments, competitions and other activities everyone is busy testing waters in anything and everything, be it an introvert or an extrovert (although you could hardly differentiate between an introvert and an extrovert). After a month in b-school, I thought that the dust has settled until one fine Friday afternoon, during the last economics lecture before midterm. The professor explained the cost of production concepts and by the time he ended the lecture reinstating the importance of opportunity cost in decision making I was already nostalgic.
The month of the August has just started and CAT is just 4 months away from now. So it is the time to accelerate your CAT preparation and improve your skills and knowledge for those 3 hours for which you prepared for last 1 or 2 years. In January 2018, when the result of the CAT will be published the thing which will most matter is the performance of those 3 hours, not the effort you gave for the last few years. So failing at those 3 hours means that you have to wait for another 1 year to get your dream.
Between IIM Bangalore and IIM Ahmedabad, or even IIM Calcutta for that matter, it would be too naive to say that one is better than the other. Considering that placements is the major factor in deciding an Indian b-school for most aspirants, the placement scenario in IIM A and IIM B is pretty similar. However, the culture and the course structure in these two Meccas of Indian education has stark differences. I will point out the differences based on which I made my decision to choose IIM Bangalore over IIM Ahmedabad.
Joining an IIM is a dream of all MBA aspirants but not all get a chance to do that. India has 20 IIMs now and I got an opportunity to be a part of one of the baby IIMs, IIM Sirmaur.
It was the afternoon slot. I had reached Pune and the city was under the spell of the afternoon siesta. I was just in time to have lunch and go for the test. It was 4th December – my best friend’s birthday. And (unfortunately) I had my CAT Exam. I had not been quite serious about it. I had secured a PPO at Siemens and was giving CAT just as an experience. All peers in my engineering college had joined a class or two or some of the test series. I had done nothing. Just one day before I had solved a mock test paper on the official CAT website and that was it. I took a printout of the hall ticket, booked a bus ticket for Pune, went to watch “El Clasico” at my friend’s house, came home and slept peacefully.
Before I go on and on about how special and beautiful IIM Indore is (Oh yes, it's gorgeous, to say the least, so much so , if not reminded of the deadlines constantly, I would be on vacation mode 24x7) and how much I cherish each and every moment I get to spend here, I would like you all to have a look at something I wrote exactly a year ago when I was unable to make it to the final list of this very reputed company that had come for placements to my engineering institute:
''You are not down until you decide you are down''