Snapshots

Name: Saurav Goswami
Graduation College : BITS Pilani
Course: BE (Hons) Mechanical
Graduation Aggregate: 6.06/10
Pursuing/Pursued MBA from: Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow (IIM L)
Corresponding entrance test & score :
CAT score : 99.77 percentile overall, 98+ section-wise

GD/PI calls from:

• Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIM C)
• Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow (IIM L)
• Faculty of Management Studies (FMS)
• Xaviers Labour Relations Institute (XLRI)
  *Applied only to IIM A,B,C,L

GD/PI calls converted:

• Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow (IIM L), PGP-ABM (Agri-business Management)

Entrance Exams appeared: CAT, FMS, & XAT

Preparation:

I started preparing 2-3 months before taking the CAT. There were no fixed number of hours I would study, but it would be around 7-8 hours a week. I mainly solved past years papers and took many of the all India test series to know how the competition was. It is important to know what you need to learn and what you can already do. I didn't waste time practicing simple things over and over again, so it was much easy for me to manage time.

WHY Agri Business Management (ABM):

I wanted to work in marketing after my MBA. Also, I wanted to do my MBA immediately after graduation. The ABM course is good for marketing and I have an interest in retail and food industry, which is covered very well in this course. So I selected ABM.

Advice to juniors:

Be ready to leave things which are uncomfortable. It doesn't matter as attempting 60-70% of the paper is enough. If there is too much that you are uncomfortable with, then start by learning the simplest of the lot, until you can attempt enough questions.
Don't blindly practice the same things too much. It's about doing a combination of various things at the same time which makes entrances difficult. So practice doing entire papers rather than topics. Do topics only if you are absolutely clueless about the basics. If its a difficult question from a topic, it's wiser to leave it rather than waste time on it.

Experience in MBA Institute:

The faculty has been good here. No complains as such. Visiting faculty is something worth noting, they are experts from the industry. The experience here has been wonderful on all counts.