Priyanka shah BMS Student Cracking CAT topper interview

Priyanka shah BMS Student Cracking CAT topper interview Name: Priyanka shah Graduation: Bachelor in Management Studies, Mumbai University CAT Percentile: 99.14 IIM Calls: A, L, K, S, New IIMs Converts: L, K, S, New IIMs First things first, at IIM Lucknow, or at any other IIM for that matter, I don’t think engineers have any greater advantage over their commerce/arts counterparts in terms of coping up with the curriculum. Both have their respective strong and weak points. CAT is the first and the only (mental) hurdle that commerce/arts graduates face when it comes to the entire journey through an IIM. On the preparation front, it is very important to be clear with your basics. I spent almost 6 hours every day in the last 4 months of CAT preparation working on the foundation of quant and DI. Being from a commerce background, just like any average commerce graduate, these were my weak subjects too. The shortcut videos by Rav sir are simply amazing and cannot be found in any of those fat books. It’s definitely the USP of Cetking. They made my quant ride so much more comfortable and easy. Next, I memorising squares, roots, multiplication tables and flash card words (yes, these too!). Along with those, I also ensured a minimum amount of reading every day. Being comfortable with typical chapters like percentages, ratios, profit and loss is the key to crack most DI questions. In my CAT paper, there was only one DI passage out of 4 which did not involve any of these 3 chapters. Logic was rather a cake walk for me. But then here accuracy comes into the picture. When you are good at some topic, you have to make sure to sustain that 90-95% accuracy. The Cetking course material is sufficient to cover all the topics and a lot of CAT based questions. For extra practice I would recommend books written by Arun Sharma. Mocks formed a very important part of my preparation. I took about 20 full length mocks (that number only sounds big, after the 5th mock I enjoyed solving mocks rather than questions from the books). Analysing each mock is very critical to improve the score of the next one. CETKing provides a detailed analysis of your mock in terms of the time you spent on a question vis-à-vis that spent by an average student on the same question. It was very helpful for me to actually map out my strong areas and areas for improvement. There is no formula for the number of questions required to score a 99 percentile plus. The only idea is to attempt as many questions you can in the best of your ability while maintaining above 75% accuracy. Finally, I believe it was sheer hard work over luck that helped book my flight ticket to Lucknow. A lot of practice is the mantra to crack the CAT. Engineers haven’t been preparing for the CAT all their lives, it’s just that they have done a lot of problem solvingduring their graduation years. Hence if you replicate that kind of hard work in remaining time, you will just sail through. Keep the motivation high, don’t worry about the results and enjoy the process! Priyanka Shah IIM Lucknow