Preparing for CAT within a short span of time can be a challenge unless the right strategies are applied. Many renowned coaching centers fail to provide students with right resources to ace the examination. Here are the few strategies that I followed which helped me sail through the challenging phase and enter the coveted B-school.
"CAT is around the corner. There’s less than a month left for the date with CAT. The 24th of November is the date which will decide your fate. It’s a do or die scenario for all you CAT aspirants".
"I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy"
It has been almost a year since I started with the preparation of a so called ‘tough exam’ – CAT. There are some things that come to you naturally even if you try to turn a blind eye to everything around you. One such thing is the thought of your past academic scores. The world starts talking about them till the point you really start asking to yourself - ‘How would I have known in my class X or XII that I’d be taking up CAT exam one day?’
This is an open letter from an MBA student to a CAT aspirant. This isn’t a letter to an unknown person. But the words a senior friend of mine passed onto me and which I am passing down to you all.
One of the major questions MBA aspirants have is how to prepare for CAT. Many go to coaching institutions but are still not able to crack the exam with good percentile, while some people do manage to get into top IIMs in the very first attempt with self-study, like me ;)
What does it mean to you to know that there's one last month left to take an MBA entrance exam that is occupying a fair part of your mind space for quite a while now? I know that the countdown brought me anxiety and focus in equal measure. But let's face it, we all prepare for CAT quite differently, some of us started later and some of us just want to get a feel of the exam so we seriously re-attempt CAT the following year. My point is, don't let the ticking clock lessen your motivation to finish what you started well. To be very honest, when I was preparing for CAT 16, I used to avoid reading stories about the number of days left to write CAT because those articles used to be by people who had reached heights I didn't dream of or the fact that they set the bar high in terms of the things to do (I was a BBA student back then). So I did what felt right to me to stay motivated to see this to its end and I've listed some of these down.
The first step towards FMS was cracking the dreaded CAT examination. Here's my journey of scoring 99.47 percentile (OA)
