The inspirational journey of CAT toppers is a great source of motivation for the current aspirants. Every journey shows how obstacles cannot hinder your way to success if you are determined and is ready to give your 100 percent. Here’s the Interview of CAT topper Mayank, who hails from a small town of Bihar, scored 99.76%ile in the CAT exam and converted IIM Bangalore. With dedication, consistency and proper guidance , chasing path towards your target becomes easy. Let’s discuss the motivational journey of a CAT topper Mayank.
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Who is CAT Topper Mayank?
Mayank is a CAT topper who belong from Samastipur, Bihar. Talking about his schooling, till 10th he studied in Bihar only and then did his 12th from Delhi. Mayank has completed his B.Tech from Jadavpur University, Kolkata and then since July 2018 he have been working in Samsung, Bangalore. He scored 99.76%ile. In VARC it was 99.54%ile, in DILR it was 94.89 and 99.67%ile in the QA section. Basically it was Mayank’s second attempt where in the first attempt he had scored 98.9%ile. In the second attempt, he scored 99.76%ile.
Mayank’s Journey to a 99.76 Percentile in the CAT and His Challenges During Preparation
Mayank has started his preparation in the month of March and quickly brushed up on the basics. He had scored 98.9%ile in the first attempt and because of that his basics were already clear. After getting done with the basics, he started taking mocks. When the pandemic had occurred and lockdown took place, he was stuck at his flat for 4 months. So, in that particular time he was all alone for 4 months and all he had to do was the office work, look after himself and do the preparation.
Mayank has maintained strategy across individual sections. Talking first about the VARC section, the strategy was to attempt the questions according to the difficulty level. If the passage was easy, he used to speed up while solving and when the passage was tough then he used to go slow and solve the questions carefully.
In DILR section, Mayank have practiced a lot of sets. Candidates can get around 200 sets of DILR questions from the iQuanta portal and also solved most of the sets from the website itself. During the exam, candidate should read all the sets and then decide which set candidate have to attempt.
In Quants, candidates can divide the time into 3 rounds. In the first round, candidate should go on to solve the easy questions, in the second round, student have to solve the tougher questions and in the last round candidates can attempt the leftover questions for which they are not sure whether to attempt or not. One thing that student have to keep in mind for quants is the shortcuts. It is important to apply the shortcuts to solve the questions in order to save time across sections.
The pattern was changed that much, it was the time duration and the number of questions that decreased a little bit. Mayank was thankful to iQuanta for providing the mocks which were according to the latest pattern of the CAT exam and iQuanta was the only one that was doing this. So, due to these mocks he was able to practice the questions according to the latest pattern and score well in the exam.
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What Improvements Did CAT Topper Mayank Make in His Second Attempt?
There were some major changes that he made in his second attempt during CAT preparation. In VARC he decided to attempt RCs according to their difficulty level. In Quants, he applied some shortcuts to solve the questions that Indrajeet sir had provided. And apart from that there were some practice series that iQuanta provided in the course – LRDI 70 and QA 250 where plenty of questions and sets were available for practice. So, he would say that iQuanta definitely helped him a lot in scoring 99.76%ile in the CAT exam.
During his preparation time, the hardest thing for Mayank to do was to maintain consistency in his preparation as he was a working professional. But, here at iQuanta, the community remains active all the time as students get notifications at any time of the day that some questions or doubts are posted in the group. So, by looking at this thing he used to get so much motivation by seeing how driven all the aspirants are for the CAT exam. No matter how hectic day would go, Mayank was practicing questions each and every day.
He gave around 67 mocks in total. And talking about the analysis, he used to take around 1-2 hours for analysis where he would not only see what questions went wrong or right but also used to see the methods and approach of the solution so that he would apply it from the next time. Mayank’s strongest section was the QA section and the weakest was DILR and somewhat VARC too. So, for DILR he solved around 150 sets in total for practice and for VARC, his approach was to eliminate the RCs according to their difficulty level.
For GDPI, he would say that candidate should be well presentable and would be able to sell themselves in a good way. Questions from current affairs and politics do come but at the end it depends on candidate’s profile and background too. They have to be confident and ready for every type of question that the interviewers might ask from you.
How iQuanta Helped Mayank (99.76%iler) in His CAT Journey?
Talking about the pedagogy, there are plenty of sets available for the practice of DILR. For quants, there are shortcuts that Indrajeet Singh provides to bring out the solution and of course the detailed analysis of the mocks. All these things in overall are really helpful for anyone who is enrolling into iQuanta coaching.
The advice that Mayank would like to give to all other aspirants is that you have to be consistent and you must have a good strategy for your preparation because at the end of the day consistency and the right approach is something that matters.
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