This isn’t an article on how I conquered CAT. This isn’t an article on how I plan to bell the CAT. This article is about what I want to do and where I go from here. My performance this year was appalling. I scored a 95.38 percentile in VA and I don’t even want to reveal my QA percentile. I am not going to talk about the CAT debacle. Everyone’s been aware of what has been going on.
I gave my CAT exam on the 26th of October, 2013. I vividly remember the day the results came out. I was nervous but hopeful. I was in office at the time the scores came out. A few of my colleagues had checked theirs and were asking me to check mine as well. I checked my score only after I came back home. I wasn’t expecting an earth shattering result but hoping for a decent enough score to get me a call. But fate had something else in store. I was devastated, heart-broken. I had spent almost the entire 6 months before the exam in office working for nearly 17 hours a day without a day’s leave. Coming back home to get some sleep. Maybe I was expecting too much, with little effort to back that up. My score wasn’t good enough for any of the colleges. So, NO CALLS. I didn’t fare too well in the other exams as well. The only positive was the feb 2014 CMAT where I barely managed an AIR of 568. That’s it. With 4 years of work-ex in IT, time is running out. Or is it?
There are people who say that I should work towards GMAT now and that I should do an executive MBA. They say that I have “too much” of work-ex and that It would be foolishness on my part to give CAT another shot. “Why on earth would I waste 2 years in college when I can put in just 1 year?” – They say. I have a question. If studying for 2 years is a waste of time then why are 1.74 lakh people having a go at it? I still aim to do a full time MBA from a reputed college. It’s not a sin to seek knowledge. I believe that I have what it takes to bell the CAT. There are people who say that I have lost my mind. Some say that it has become sort of an egoistic pursuit.
I will sit again for CAT this year. I haven’t learnt to give up. If you want something desperately, you would work hard to get it. This is what I have learnt in all these years. Nothing in life has come easy and I know this won’t too. So, why not prove the detractors wrong? Instead of waiting for things to happen, why not go out all guns blazing? Who knows what the future holds? For all those who have given up –
“ Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”
Theodore Roosevelt
PS: Pardon me if I have made any grammatical mistakes. A first timer you see.