With love to all CAT lovers

I honestly think the following article got more attention than it deserved. I am reproducing the article as I had sent it to the media relations committee here on the campus. You can then contrast it to the published articles in TOI and Telegraph. The Telegraph article was still okay, but as a dear friend pointed out, the TOI article wasn't "ashishy" enough!

One must love a cat on its own terms. ~Paul Gray

This year again, on the third Sunday of the month of November, the nation would indulge in a fierce battle of wits. The fighters would change, the battle ground would change and the intensity would differ, but the prize will remain a coveted seat in one of the best management institutes in the country. I was fortunate enough to bell the CAT in 2007, in my second attempt at it. In this article, I’d like to share my two cents worth of learning I had picked up during preparation. Having played the game and failed at it, I feel I have some insights that will help you in planning your preparation.
CAT aspirants are of two types, those who’ve recognized that CAT is a different type of an exam, and those who will not succeed this year. It is a harsh way of putting it, but this is what I realized for myself once I reflected upon my reasons for failure. All of us have been taking exams since kindergarten, and all of us have developed a tool kit for dealing with them. The problem with CAT is that the same toolkit will not work unless modified. The difference comes from the reason that CAT is an exam that requires you to optimize and not maximize returns. I can’t be sure that after reading the above line you’ll treat the exam differently, but I can promise that unless you start thinking of it as a fundamentally different exam, it would be hard to crack CAT.
Having understood that the exam is different, there are three steps I’d like to advice in setting up your preparation:
Know Thyself: Throughout your preparation keep it in mind that you are different. You’ll hear a lot of advice from teachers, seniors and friends about test taking strategy. Listen to all of that, but do what works the best for you. The only universal advice I can think of is, join a test series with some preparation institute. That not only brings a structure and discipline to the whole preparation but keeps you abreast of what your competitors are learning. Other than this it is just you vs. yourself. Think of your training like perfecting a cycle:
Perform
Compare this with a traditional exam preparation that goes like:
Perform
Most of us end up paying a lot less attention to the analyzing and reflecting phase. Do not do that. After every test you take (and take at least one in a week starting today) analyze the mistakes you made, the section that didn’t go well and most importantly the concepts you muddled up in. In the next week just do a concentrated preparation on these subject areas through textbook and practice exercises. Try to catch hold of the root cause of the problem and not the symptom. It is easy to think your problem in RC is slow reading speed when actually you are missing out because you don’t answer the question being asked. You’ll see that if you single out the root cause of the issue it would be really easy to plug the hole.
Know Thy Enemy: There is no official course material for CAT, no fixed format and no syllabus. The test tries to test you in a new environment each time. So an important learning is to stay adaptable and let the format of the test decide how you perform at it. Which section to attempt first and how much time to give to it, is the most difficult problem of optimization in CAT. Another problem is when to leave the question you think you know. I’d say practice all possible strategies for you during preparation. Change the order of sections, time per section and choice of questions. Of course, when you change strategy make sure it is required to perfect the learning cycle discussed above, not because you have been advised to. And throughout the exam, remember, you have to maximize your score in minimum time. This is the only objective. So whether you solve the question from the choices, from a formula you know or from sheer hunch makes absolutely no difference. Make sure you have this maximization intent running through your blood stream when you sit down to take the test.
Know thy battleground: The day of the exam will be a lot different from other tests you’d take during preparation. I myself was never a consistent performer in the test series I joined. I would always perform poorly in either quant or verbal. In fact, of the 12 odd test series exams I undertook during preparation, I crossed 99%ile only once. So did I get lucky on the day of the exam? I of course like to think otherwise. On the day everything would come down to a test of nerves. As you might realize if you do the last year’s paper sitting at home, the exam is not really that tough. Yet, every serious aspirant will underperform in it just because of nerves. I cannot emphasize the importance of a positive frame of mind that day. Do anything that works for you but feel confident about yourself that day and think of it like another test you are about to take. Past performance, uncompleted syllabus, the fear of a section - all should be replaced by one encompassing belief – today is my day. It will make a lot of difference.
I hope the above strategies help. Just keep the faith and you’ll do great. All the best

Life at Hel(L): The first impressions

Having completed a term at IIM Lucknow I like to believe I now have the necessary knowledge to give a shot to this ambitious topic. 
Hel(L) is an often (over)used adjective used to describe this campus. Here L is used to convey the geographic location to a person visiting this place while Hell conveys the essence of the location, meant for some-one who intends to spend a part of his life here. I would not like to judge the life at hel(L) right now. It would be too rash to do that only after the first term. I am sure with time my idea of the life at hel(L) will more closely resemble the life here. Regardless of the facts, one definite thing about the first impression is that there is only one such impression and that is the one I intend to convey in this post- the facts and the impression they had on a typical fresher.

The beginning
I had very little idea about the campus and my batchmates when I stepped onto the Lucknow railway platform on the fateful day of 20th june. I believe I am the eternal optimist. A lot of things in my life haven't gone as expected and yet every bad thing makes me more confident of a good thing coming up next. I guess this faith is based on the belief that life in its attempt to be fair, can't be bad to me on a trot. What this assumption doesn't account for is that life doesn't need to be fair. So you may have toiled hard in your engineering college, a college that was deprived of females, and away from any eventful places in the city. And again, you might have ended up in a job far away from home, in a company deprived of females. The eternal optimist still believes this time things would be different. And so did I.
Punjab National Bank(PNB) likes to believe they are a part of the IIM-L family. They were there to pick me up at the Lucknow station. A gesture that was obviously followed by a process of providing details about the education loan offers from them. But I think it was fair deal, and just because of this gesture of paternal concern, I chose PNB to be my pocket-money providers for the coming two years. The ride from the station was too long for my liking. The city of Lucknow is quite modern in its design, though just like Delhi, it has come up on need basis. But as we left the city behind i got worried, the inevitable was becoming obvious. We took a left from the Sitapur higway and 3.4 km (significance elaborated later) down we came to the place that has been unimaginatively christened "Prabandh Nagar". At the heart of this place, surrounded by forest like vegetation and far from any human civilization, I saw the gates of "Bhartiya Prabandh Sansathan". At that moment, I knew life had pulled another one on me.

The first impressions
The first impressions of a place are based significantly on where you are coming from. Since I was coming from Microsoft, my expectations from the campus were needlessly high. So even though the campus is actually very pretty, I remember my inital impression was just the opposite. There are lush green lawns, beautful fountains and nicely designed academic blocks and hostels. There is a draw of lots to decide which hostel you get and I was lucky to get room in hostel 11, a city hostel. (City(hostels 9-14) is a term used to distinguish these hostels from Slums (hostels 1-8) which are, regardless of what their residents will try to reason out, just slums!)
The first two days were quite boring. I just spent them lazing around, delibrating on my decision to join L. On Monday, 22nd June, the games began. The induction process is part-prof part-senior driven programme intended to give a preview of the life that will follow. Life becomes a distant blur in this three day whirlwind tour, but it is worth it. It sets the pace for the challenging time that will follow.

The Professors
I am now quite certain that eccentricity is a qualifying criterion for recruiting faculty. Nothing else explains the large proportions these people occupy the faculty rooms. In my perception, Lucknow, like other good institutes has the following types of faculty.
The Gods: These are the people who know their subject inside out. They mean what they say, and it is left to the student to be able to match up to their standards. I was fortunate to have two such profs in my first term.
The Eccentrics: These are by far the most famous profs on campus characterized by their area of specialization in their eccentricity. So there is a prof who gives marks only to groups that has females. Prof who would mark you absent if you forget to bring your name plate to the class. Prof who is so fond of socialism he'll deduct marks from students who does too well in the course. Prof who would tell you to write the chapter by hand in case you forgot to read it for the class. I think it is fair to say that when it comes to eccentrics, at IIM Lucknow, we have the works.
The Dociles: They are mild-natured, generally good hearted professors who teach not so known courses and teach them well. They are mostly generous in their evaluation, so no-one really flunks in their subjects. By a prof standard, these are too normal and therefore earn the distinction of being the most easily forgettable faces on the campus.
The pain-in-the-ass: This are the ones who will give you the worst time on the campus. They don't know anything about what they are teaching and yet they earn some sadistic pleasure in giving tough exams, ambiguous projects and flunking students by the dozen. They are in the holistic sense a pain-in-the-ass. 

The language
Every close knit community develops a language of its own. This is because it soon finds the existing language seriously inefficient at conveying the essence of what is felt. Lucknow is no different and the following is the compilation of some of the lingo used on the campus.
Globe: Sometimes when you encounter a new word, you can't help but wonder, how you got about without knowing this word before. Globe is one such word. In its particular usage here, it is defined as both a noun and a verb. As a noun it means a tactless/factless and meaningless peace of information. An examination answer that converts a one line information to a two page note is a typical case in point. As a verb it is the act of writing, speaking or otherwise communicating globe.
CP: Class Participation carries marks in classes. Thought it is not taken as seriously as, say IIM Ahmedabad, where each prof brings along his teaching assistant specifically to evaluate class participation. Still, the questions, the answers and overall conduct in classes earns marks. And therefore for many students it unleashes the dangerously curious child who was hitherto latent. Such intellectual degradation of the environment in pursuit of earning marks is termed CP. 
RG-giri: RG stands for relative grading, a system of rewarding marks on a relative, rather than an absolute scale. So even if you get 80 while the class on an average gets 80.5, you are screwed. This concept gives rise to an increasingly selfish behavior often known as doing "RG-giri"


The Life
The life inside the campus is designed to make you forget any life outside it. The sooner you accept that life will not be the same for the two years on the campus, the easier it would be to cope up with the transition. Again, the quality of life you experience at IIM lucknow is inversely proportional to the quality of life you expected. But there are a few generalizations. If you intend to remain even mildly competitive then the sleep goes for a toss, subsitituted with assignments, project work and group meetings. I felt there was an air of too much competition around and atleast in the first term I felt egos getting involved too soon in group decision making. Though most courses are well structured, there are a few that are very random in nature. So sometimes the assignments and projects will make you wonder about the purpose of it all. Such "why am I doing this" and "how will this make me better" will crop up time and again in the first term and will mostly remain unanswered. The people here are quite versatile and most of them have atleast some skills you can learn from. Also there is a feeling of fraternity that develops within the students, just like any other group that shares the same pain. Despite the presence of insti-party (where our on-campus rock band 3.4 often performs) and other "social" events I think there is a lot of solitary time you spend.This solitary time is not to be confused with personal time as most of it will be taken up by some curricular/non-curricular activity. In the lack of this personal time I felt life often went ahead of me. But having said that, for an avid learner, there is a lot to learn from each bit and piece that constitutes the first term on the campus. I feel that I have had none other 3 month period in my life of denser learning. I write this line returning back to the campus after a 5 day break at the end of first term. Lets see how the games unfold in the 2nd term starting tomorrow. Cheers!