Yesterday was the first day for buying applications and registering for this year’s newly transformed Online CAT (so is the acronym OCAT now??). Another variation in this year’s CAT of providing an exam window of 10 days has sent students scrambling to Axis Bank branches as early as 7am in order to register first and appear on a later date. (Info courtesy @arunraveen who was at the back end of that queue) I suppose in the coming years TIME, IMS and their ilk would have module which will help students analyze and decide the optimal day during the window at which to appear for the exam in order to gain a competitive advantage over their fellow aspirants. Of course this would be very reasonably priced at 5000 rupees or so, with abundance of course material to go with it. I digress...anyways the thing is that it seemed like a fine time to shirk of my inherent laziness and write a long overdue post about my incredible CAT adventure that changed the course of my professional career even before it actually began.
I was just into my final year of engineering (the most amazing years of my life) and was thoroughly disillusioned with prospects of working as a software engineer in a year’s time, primarily because my interest and knowledge about coding in any form was zilch...zero (just to emphasize). Thus a bit of thought and introspection and also interaction with few others (not boring anyone with nitty-gritty’s of it) lead me to the conclusion that an MBA would be the savior of my otherwise doomed to fail prospective career path.
The choice I made about my career path was to an extent guided by majority persuasion. All these aspirants had turned to MBA as if it was higher calling(which it was in a monetarily..until the recession that is..) and there after the one and only course of action in front of all of them was to appear for CAT. Now the perception about CAT among MBA aspirants is that of a mythological conquest, especially if you are a fresher. All you here is about it being the toughest exam in the world and the conversion ratio of 2-3% is lower than that of Harvard..blah..blah..blah. Legend will be written and tales will be told in the future (Ohhk...I lifted this line from football commentary but who could have guessed it :D) about those heroes who successfully complete this mighty conquest. There was many a serious aspirant who started their preparation very early, way before I even made the decision to appear for CAT. Now talking about my preparation we again come to the term that appears frequently in this post...zilch..zero. I hadn’t appeared for any of the so called “Mock CAT’s” conducted by a host of these coaching centres in various cities in Kerala. Not even for the one conducted by The TIME Coaching centre in tie-up with “Club Mathematica” in our college campus. Now this particular “Mock exam” was in my opinion nothing more than a photo-collection exercise for next year’s ad campaigns. Considering the fact that around 10 people get into IIMs from every passing out batch of our college and many more do so after working for a few years, some smart alec must have figured it out that collecting the photos of as many as possible from our college would be come in handy for every year's "success" ad campaigns which they come out with as soon as the results are declared. My attempt at CAT was intended as a practice for more serious attempts in the coming years and the chances of me clearing it could have been summarized in one word..IMPOSSIBLE!!!
Now, as I mentioned before, there was no shortage of MBA aspirants in our college and I think more than a 100 folks were all set to give the exam on the fateful day. I must also make a mention of the fact that majority of these aspirants had preparation levels that were comparable to mine. So on the day of the exam I was pretty much like Frodo..not even Frodo..more like Pippin (going along for the ride) heading out to Mordor to take on the might of Sauron without likes of Gandalf or Aragon or the others to support me. One of my friends told me recently that I had asked me what DI stood for on the morning of the exam (for the uninitiated DI stands for Data Interpretation and is 1 of the 3 main sections of the CAT exam paper). The D-Day was just another day for all of us lazy laggards who comprised the majority of those who set out and were just making a token appearance. The majority of aspirants boarded our Jeeps to the various examination centres in the city with exalted hopes of a chance encounter with a beautiful member from the fairer sex who would be among the throngs who had descended onto the city from all parts of the state to appear for this exam. Exam was an unremarkable affair as far as I was concerned. I went in, did whatever I could to the best of my ability and left the place. The highlight of the day was the Fish Biriyani I had from the Zain’s Restaurant in the city which is one of the best fish biriyani that I have ever had in my life! (Coming from me that’s saying a lot ).
By the night after the exam the TIME, IMS and their ilk where at it again publishing solution keys of the question paper (none of which turned anywhere near accurate when the actual key was published). Everyone were busy comparing their answers (of which they had made a note of in the question paper) to the keys and coming out with their scores and accessing their chances of getting calls again based on previous year’s information. No one told me that I was supposed to make a note of the questions I had attempted and which option I chose..duh! Hence I remained without an inkling of my performance in the exam. Many days passed by during which there was speculation about the date of CAT results to which I didn’t pay much heed. The one fine morning in January the campus was abuzz with news that CAT results were out. Frantic individuals were scrambling to find out the results by whichever means possible (the site had crashed quite early itself). The outcome was a mixed bag all round with many a surprise result...of the good and bad kind. I too gradually checked my scores through a friend’s mobile through an SMS service and, lo, to mine and everyone else’s surprise I had done relatively very well getting a score which would fetch me a few calls. Whatay shocking surprise it really was!!! My initial response was like that of Monica’s when Ross tells her that his lesbian ex-wife Carol is pregnant in FRIENDS Season1, Episode 2, 6:40 . A while later, when the site was up and running again, I confirmed that I had indeed received calls for GD/PI from 4 different IIMs.
After the elation of this success I had to get started on my preparation for the next level which would prove to be even tougher. But preparations did take a serious note from then on and I was fortunate enough to crack the GD/PI level for one of the IIMs and thus complete the transformation of my career path along a much more preferred and desirable trajectory.Maybe that's one for another blog post, but its really not much of a tale.Anyways, now I would like to wrap up this post on a sober note saying that this is in no way meant to be disrespectful to the all those folks who work hard to “bell the CAT” but may this be an inspiration for the many happy-go-lucky souls out there. Just to let it be known that IMPOSSIBLE IS NOTHING is not just an Adidas tag line!
P.S- A special thanks to Tony Sebastian, a. k. a, @notytony who put the idea of blogging about this whole experience into my head.
