There are people who score well in the CAT exam, and there are people who score well in the CAT while working a full-time job, starting preparation in September, and still managing to stay calm enough to actually enjoy the process, and Ishan Gundre is exactly that kind of a student. He is a B.Tech Electronics graduate with 23 months of work experience who sat down in September, trusted the process, gave everything he had to his preparation and walked out of CAT 2025 with a 99.57 percentile score that most people spend years chasing. And then, just when you think the story is going to follow the usual path of IIM calls and campus placements, it takes a turn that makes it so much more worth reading because no IIM from BLACKI gave him a single call despite that score, and he still ended up converting FMS Delhi, which is one of the most respected MBA colleges in the entire country.
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About CAT Topper and His Academic Background
Talking about the academic qualifications, he scored 94 percent in his 10th standard, 74 percent in his 12th standard and 79 percent in his graduation (B.Tech in Electronics), and after finishing college he went straight into a technical job where he spent 23 months before deciding that engineering alone was not going to take him where he wanted to go in his career. His CAT 2025 scorecard is something that anyone preparing for this exam would be proud of because he scored 46.15 in Verbal Ability and Reading Comprehension which put him at 99.44 percentile, then scored 23.25 in Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning which put him at 96.44 percentile and scored 25.65 in Quantitative Ability which came out to 98.77 percentile and his overall scaled score of 95.06 placed him at 99.57 percentile overall. He did not stop at CAT exam either because he scored 99 percentile in XAT, 287 marks in NMAT and 94 percentile in SNAP which tells you that his performance was not a one-day thing but something he had genuinely built over months of consistent work.
How He Started His CAT Exam Preparation?
Ishan’s story started when he wanted to access more opportunities and get into a management job, something really different from his tech job. So when he reach out to his seniors, they recommended doing an MBA. So, for familiarity, he gave hjs first CAT attempt and scored 95%ile. Then, he decided to go for it again, but the job caught up faster, and preparation feels far away.
Still, when he started his preparation in September, he focused only on concepts and practice: no distractions and fear. He was convinced that stress doesn’t reward anything. So, he remained calm and daily shows up for the preparation. Job pressure, don’t worry, do your prep. Low mock scores, don’t worry, analyse and solve questions.
How iQuanta Played a Role in His CAT Preparation?
Ishan joined iQuanta’s CAT Mock Test Series during his preparation, and when he talks about what actually helped him, he keeps coming back to the quality of the solutions more than anything else because for someone who was preparing on his own without a lot of time to waste, having a mock series that did not just test you but actually taught you through detailed video and text solutions that explained every single step without skipping anything was exactly what he needed. When he got a question wrong he could sit with the solution, go through it completely, understand exactly where his thinking had gone off track and then fix that specific gap instead of just moving on and hoping it would not come up again on exam day. That kind of honest and thorough feedback loop repeated over weeks and weeks is what helped him turn his mock performance into actual exam performance and it is also what kept his confidence intact on the days when the scores were not looking great because he knew that every wrong answer had a solution waiting for him that would make things clearer.
Conclusion
Ishan’s story hits differently when you hear that a 99.57 percentile in CAT, a 99 percentile in XAT and conversions at MDI Gurgaon and FMS Delhi were not enough to get him a single call from the IIM BLACKI group and that is the hard reality of being a General category Engineering Male candidate in this system where the competition is brutal and the seats are few. It broke him for a moment and it would break most people but he did not sit with that feeling for long because he had other calls to attend, other interviews to crack and he went into each of them with the same focus he had brought to his preparation and the result is that FMS Delhi, one of the best MBA colleges in India, is where he is headed. The IIMs missed someone good and FMS Delhi is going to be better for having him and that is probably the cleanest way to end a story that was never really about which college said yes but about a person who refused to let anyone else’s no become his full stop.
