CAT Tales-2

I really don’t know when I decided to appear for CAT. It was one of those things that you don’t discuss openly or give a thought to but are considered automatic choices.

Right from the time I joined VIT for my B.Tech I knew that at the end of four years I would be joining an MBA program. Talk about herd mentality.

Well by way of preparation I didn’t do much except started working on Norman Lewis "Word Power Made Easy" infinite number of times (though never managed to finish it, and this fact stands true to this date).

Then in second year one of my friends bought this book for preparation for CAT by this guy called Mohd. Muneer. I thought probably I should do the same as well and bought the book or rather had my friend get it for me. And God Himself is my witness when I say I never opened that book beyond the first 25 or 30 pages. All that I worked on was the Diagnostic Test. I scored pretty decent on the Test something like average or above average. Well that was bad because I never touched that book again.

Meanwhile those of my friends (from school) who were doing simple graduation from elsewhere were appearing for CAT and had joined various coaching instis and shared some valuable tips regarding CAT.

Now came the third year. That’s when I decided to be serious about my preparation. I ordered Career Launcher material. Well it wasn’t as if I turned serious overnight. The CL material just sat there until my guilt finally overcame me and I finally abandoned CS (Counter Strike) for CL (Career Launcher) in my 6 sem.

A lot of things happened in between. I appeared for the open TIME AIMCAT in my 3 year. I had no clue that anything of this sort happened. Somebody in the hostel was talking to somebody else about this free test (and I happened to overhear them) which you could give and that too on a Sunday. I thought lets give it a shot. After all it is free and there is no downside to it other than getting up early on a Sunday morning.

Well I gave that test and really felt good about it. Not for the way I fared in the test but I just felt genuinely happy at the stuff that was asked in the paper.

When the results came out it turned out that I hadn't done all that bad. I managed to get a 97 odd aggregate percentile with some 99 in Verbal, 97 in DI and somewhere in 50s in Quants. Ironic, you would say for someone studying to become an engineer.

Well preparation went off and on in the third year until sem exams and then placement head aches took over.