If you are an MBA aspirant, I want you to ask one thing from yourself - “Do I really want to do an MBA?” If the answer is yes, then think of what is it that inspires you to do so . There must be a strong force behind it otherwise there are chances one will lose motivation and fail.

Still in school and as a young growing teen, I happened to develop a liking for the works of the famous author, Chetan Bhagat. I would say that I found my reason behind doing an MBA from the inspiration I drew from his books itself. I used to love reading his books . So the plan for me was simple, at least on paper! I aimed to first pursue B.tech from an IIT and then do an MBA from IIM. As every aspirant I dreamed of the best.

After my class 10th, I went to the most famous city in India for engineering entrance exams’ coaching - KOTA! I went through a hard grill for two years preparing for JEE exams but could not make it to IITs. Eventually, I ended up taking admission in an Agricultural University through ICAR and did my graduation in agricultural engineering. A detour did not deter me from my path to MBA. During college days I kept in mind my ultimate goal of doing an MBA.

I knew that for an MBA, a person’s overall personality is more important. Apart from academics, extra-curricular activities and leadership positions play a very important role. So I was always involved in organising and participating in events in the college . I started my preparation in January 2019 from Bullseye. I appeared for a scholarship test and scored well. That acted as a big motivation for me. And from here started the journey!

Looking at the CAT exam pattern, Quant and LRDI sections seemed comparatively easy to me as I was good in maths and the coaching in Kota really helped me. But the most challenging section for me was Verbal ability. I used to feel it was the most tricky section and there are always chances of error as it is subject to person-to-person judgement. So for me, to improve the verbal section, I was advised by Sakshi ma'am to read newspapers regularly and study articles from diverse sources and genres. She also asked us to solve at least two passages a day regularly. Jasneet sir helped in increasing my pace in solving Quant questions by memorising basic things and practising . 

I started giving mocks in February and used to score 85+ percentile but there was no significant increase . After that I started experimenting with my strategy in choosing and solving questions. During this experimentation, there were times when I have sometimes scored as low as 50 percentile or as high as 98 percentile. So when I started analyzing the mocks I came to a conclusion that choice of questions is the most important thing in CAT. Know your strong areas through analysis and choose questions from those areas because you don't have to solve all the questions. 

In this way riding on the wave of ups and downs I never felt like giving up. When you know what you want in your life, you are determined to go through any amount of struggle for it. This is why I again say, if you know that you really want to do an MBA you will keep motivating yourself and strive through rough times to come out victorious. I would like to mention that one major boost to my motivation was my placement in John Deere because that gave me a sense of security. After that there was no looking back and I started scoring consistently in mocks . I performed well in the final CAT exam and when I got the results I had scored 96 percentile.

When the results were out I got calls from IIM Ahmedabad and IIM Lucknow for ABM,, Faculty of Management Studies (DU), and all the new IIMs . I started preparing for the interviews with hitbullseye where I used to do mock interviews, group discussions and also writing ability tests. We were constantly given tasks to develop content. The major help was the feedback from the teachers after interviews and group discussions that gave me real insights and solutions to problems regarding communication skills or content. I appeared for my final interviews with confidence and most of the interviews went pretty well so eagerly waiting for the results.