My journey from 83 to 94 percentile in CAT: Ashrith Ananthashayana

Ashrith Ananthashayana

While working as a Design Engineer for Sankalp Semiconductor Pvt Ltd., I was preparing for CAT and had joined Time Coaching Institute for weekend coaching classes. My friends used to ask me, why I wanted to pursue MBA in India and not MS in the US since I had a core semiconductor experience. I felt with a decent technical background, if I had an MBA degree from a tier-1 B-school in the country it would definitely help me go up the corporate ladder faster as I would have both technical as well as a managerial experience to take up larger responsibilities than an MS degree which would essentially give me the same knowledge that I would have gained while working for few more years with of course a few extra dollars.

I decided that I would not compromise on the B-schools and I was targeting only the tier-1 schools in India. Cracking CAT didn’t come easy for me. It took me 2 attempts and immense dedication for about 2 years to crack it. The work was very hectic and I had absolutely no time at office to even think about CAT. Due to the horrible traffic conditions in Bangalore, it took me about an hour to travel back home so I made use of this time for my preparation. I used to solve RC and LR questions during this time and I used to work on QA and DI questions at home and during weekends.

I used to attempt a lot of mock exams which Time provided and most of them were very difficult and time consuming. The major learnings I had from this was not about solving them but reviewing them as it gave me a different perspective to solve the questions. This strategy definitely helped me in solving the questions better and my scores in the later mocks improved.

In the year 2014, I took 2 entrance exams CAT and XAT. Both of them didn’t go as expected. My strategy was completely wrong in both of them as I was focusing more on accuracy rather than trying to attempt as many questions as possible. CAT had no negative marking then and I had attempted only 55 out of 100 questions and secured a CAT percentile of 83. As I am "General Category-Engineer-Male", a combination which is considered the worst, scoring anything less than 97 percentile is a sin for such students. I was pretty dejected but I decided that CAT 2015 would be my final attempt as I had already had 3 years of work experience by then.

I didn’t do much preparation for CAT 2015 and I registered for only a few mocks from Career Launcher. Moreover I was also looking for a job change and was preparing for interviews too. I remembered almost all the concepts and a week before CAT, focused only on revising Quant concepts and solving mocks. Meanwhile I had also applied for SPJIMR and XLRI.

My strategy for CAT 2015 was different from that of 2014. This time I went all out in attempting questions and went with nothing to lose mindset. I wanted to attempt as many questions as possible hoping for a minimum of 85% accuracy on my attempts. I managed to attempt about 77 questions which was 22 more than previous year. Feeling satisfied that I had done a decent job, I left the results to the almighty and destiny.

During this gap, I received a profile based call from SPJIMR, which is a call that SPJIMR gives to candidates who have a decent academic record and profile. I had resigned from my job by then and was serving my notice period and I had received multiple offers from other companies for the post of Senior Design Engineer.

The D-Day arrived and the CAT result was announced. I had received an overall percentile of 94 with 85+ in all the sections. I also received calls from the new IIMs and converted all of them. But I didn’t want to compromise on the fact that I wanted to do an MBA from a top tier B-School.

My SPJIMR interview was scheduled in mid-February. At SPJIMR, they have a different way of interviewing candidates. They have a psychometric round followed by essay writing. The topics are usually very abstract. The topic I was given was, “One situation in my life I regret the most”.

Soon after this we had 2 sets of group interviews, the first one being an elimination round. In the group interview, a set of 5 candidates are interviewed by the panel consisting of 2 professors and an industry person (mostly an alumni) and questions are usually the same for all the candidates. This round mainly checks the candidate’s decision behind doing an MBA with respect to his prior background. If you justify it, you are through to round 2.

Round 2 is another round of group interview in which the candidate is tested on his knowledge on current affairs and is asked to give opinions on various topics. My interest in current affairs kept me abreast of the current happenings at the time and I was able to justify my opinion on the topics given.

On the March 15, 2016, I received a congratulatory mail from SPJIMR and I was selected for its flagship PGDM program.

It was a dream come true for me. After the efforts I had put in, in the last 2 years, burning the mid night oil and after facing a lot of dejection, I had finally made it.

My advice to potential aspirants is having an exam strategy and the flexibility to change it based on the situation. Perseverance is the key to success and it is very important to stay calm during the process. Finally if you really put in your efforts, you will achieve success, sooner or later.

About the Author:

I am Ashrith Ananthashayana. I graduated in Telecommunication Engineering from B N M Institute of Technology, Bangalore in the year 2012 and am currently a student of S P Jain Institute of Management & Research, Class of 2018. I have worked for Sankalp Semiconductors Pvt Ltd as a Design Engineer. I have also worked as an Architecture Validation Engineer at the client location (Broadcom Corp.)