It began in the third year. I myself wanted to do something more after engineering and had started weighing further options. Having done a lot of asking around, I decided that I would prefer staying in India and go for an MBA.
2010
I came across PaGalGuY.com through guess what? Orkut. I joined PaGaLGuY on my birthday and must say, I felt reborn. What I was about to see was something spectacular in itself. Many things catch people’s fancy, but what fancied me was “The Official Quant Thread”. I took the CAT fearlessly as I knew this was just my first attempt and scored 94.xx percentile. I wanted to take another shot and do better. I decided against taking CAT 2011 and concentrate on my on-job training.
2012
This time I had decided that I’ll take all the MBA entrance exams. I had prepared well for the C-day, but my final mock was a disaster. My mock scores had started falling and I was really disheartened by the end. However, I had around 22 attempts in Section 1 and 24 in Section 2 in the CAT eventually. The day the CAT result came, I was in absolute shock. I couldn’t believe that I had scored 99.35 percentile. I was scared, nervous and excited. And then came SNAP: 97.99, XAT: 96.xx and NMAT: 213. I had almost all calls, except SIBM and XLRI. Missed the VA cutoff by two for XLRI. And missed SIBM by 0.2 percentile. Nevertheless, I joined TIME for my interview preparation.
Interviews
My biggest weakness: I had zero knowledge of what goes around in the world. My hands were shaking as I attended my first interview at TIME. I felt so bad that I know nothing. I decided that day that I’ll read a lot, that I’ll learn as much as I could till my last interview, which was by God’s grace MDI Gurgaon. I started attending interviews, realised that I was screwing most of them up, but was happy that I had a chance. I was improving. Finally by April, I developed more confidence about interviews. MDI was my last interview. In between, the other results were being announced, all of them said the same thing: “We regret to say that you have not been selected.”
I didn’t lose heart and attended every interview hoping to improve. On April 14 was my last interview for MDI. I was confident and the discussion and interview went really well. And after so many rejects, I made it through MDI.
Just one piece of advice
Don’t give up. Hard work will never go unrewarded forever. If you want to achieve something, work hard for it and no one can ever stop you. Walk towards your destiny, holding your head up high. You’ll definitely make it big in the end.