HOW I CRACKED IT
Toppers
Say It’s All About Discipline and Confidence
Siddharth
Sharma, in his final year of electrical engineering at IIT Kanpur, owes his
success to “regularity and loads of practice”.
“The topics are easy, but you have to be thorough to crack CAT,” he advises. On an average day, he would put in about 2-3 hours preparing for the test, while during weekends and vacations it would go up to 8-9 hours. Preparations at his end started about eight months before CAT, building up in tempo as the exam approached.
His father, an associate professor of sociology in NAS College, Meerut; his homemaker mother and his younger brother encouraged him every step of the way. What helped too, was his love for reading, which explains why, unlike many other engineers, Siddharth was as strong in verbal ability as he was in quantitative. In fact, he says, he scored 100 percentile in verbal ability and logical reasoning, compared with a 99.17 percentile score in quantitative ability and data interpretation in the test.
A keen athlete and a medium distance runner, Siddharth, supplemented his studying with a classroom programme at Career Launcher over the weekends as well as the test series at TIME once a week.
He says he will be happy to get selected at any of the top three IIMs. “I can only decide once I go through the process. The thing I know for sure is that ultimately I’d love to take up a career in finance,” he says.
RAVI TEJA PALLA, 22, ASST MANAGER, COMMERCIAL VEHICLE, TATA MOTORS, PUNE
Cracking CAT is all about being disciplined and confident. I appeared for the test last year as well while studying electrical engineering at IIT Madras, but couldn’t clear it due to weak verbal ability. I worked on it rigorously and followed a simple strategy. I improved my verbal ability with a lot of reading and practice.
I took two mock tests every week and analysed the answers for three hours to understand where I went wrong. I never went by the mock test scores, as that is not the parameter to assess your performance with. Instead I would check for the accuracy of my scores to monitor my progress.
Anybody can crack CAT if given enough time, so the secret is to be accurate and confident at the time of answering the test. While I attempted all the queries, I answered those I was confident about. This is the rule of thumb, else you might waste a lot of time.
I prepared for 12 hours a week, which is a tall task for a working professional. So, I would divide the hours — six hours on weekends, writing the test, analysing and preparing the test series of the coaching institutes and clarifying doubts, if any, with faculty. The rest of the six hours I would reserve for the weekdays. You have to be disciplined to do that; my three-month-old job at Tata Motors demanded a lot of attention too. I am happy I could do it as are my parents — my father is a police inspector in Vishakhapatnam and my mother is a homemaker. SHREYA BISWAS & SREERADHA D BASU ET130110
“The topics are easy, but you have to be thorough to crack CAT,” he advises. On an average day, he would put in about 2-3 hours preparing for the test, while during weekends and vacations it would go up to 8-9 hours. Preparations at his end started about eight months before CAT, building up in tempo as the exam approached.
His father, an associate professor of sociology in NAS College, Meerut; his homemaker mother and his younger brother encouraged him every step of the way. What helped too, was his love for reading, which explains why, unlike many other engineers, Siddharth was as strong in verbal ability as he was in quantitative. In fact, he says, he scored 100 percentile in verbal ability and logical reasoning, compared with a 99.17 percentile score in quantitative ability and data interpretation in the test.
A keen athlete and a medium distance runner, Siddharth, supplemented his studying with a classroom programme at Career Launcher over the weekends as well as the test series at TIME once a week.
He says he will be happy to get selected at any of the top three IIMs. “I can only decide once I go through the process. The thing I know for sure is that ultimately I’d love to take up a career in finance,” he says.
RAVI TEJA PALLA, 22, ASST MANAGER, COMMERCIAL VEHICLE, TATA MOTORS, PUNE
Cracking CAT is all about being disciplined and confident. I appeared for the test last year as well while studying electrical engineering at IIT Madras, but couldn’t clear it due to weak verbal ability. I worked on it rigorously and followed a simple strategy. I improved my verbal ability with a lot of reading and practice.
I took two mock tests every week and analysed the answers for three hours to understand where I went wrong. I never went by the mock test scores, as that is not the parameter to assess your performance with. Instead I would check for the accuracy of my scores to monitor my progress.
Anybody can crack CAT if given enough time, so the secret is to be accurate and confident at the time of answering the test. While I attempted all the queries, I answered those I was confident about. This is the rule of thumb, else you might waste a lot of time.
I prepared for 12 hours a week, which is a tall task for a working professional. So, I would divide the hours — six hours on weekends, writing the test, analysing and preparing the test series of the coaching institutes and clarifying doubts, if any, with faculty. The rest of the six hours I would reserve for the weekdays. You have to be disciplined to do that; my three-month-old job at Tata Motors demanded a lot of attention too. I am happy I could do it as are my parents — my father is a police inspector in Vishakhapatnam and my mother is a homemaker. SHREYA BISWAS & SREERADHA D BASU ET130110
No comments:
Post a Comment