End of the season....

With me giving my NMAT on Feb 6 th marked the end of my long season of exams. I gave a whooping seven exams spread over three months. This is just one phase of the admission process and if I happen to qualify in any of these tests I then have to slog again for the next phase comprising of essays, GDs and interviews which I have heard from people who have been there before are a whole lot tougher than the written tests. No wonder that management career is tough.

The season started off with the IIFT test in mid november and it was a dream start as I managed to qualify which I wasn't expecting to because of my poor score in one of the sections.Then came the mother of all exams CAT. Any exam in which more than 3 lakh people compete for a meagre 1600 seats is challenging irrespective of the syllabus, quality of people competing etc..The challenge got tougher as CAT was presented in an all new avatar for the first time this year.Though I did slog for over 8 months with my preparation and being a software engineer I was reasonably comfortable with the on-line format, still there were a lot butterflies in my stomach before the exam.The phone calls from my friends wishing me luck and the media reports of the technical glitches faced contributed to increasing my level of nervousness. In the end it turned out to be a damp squib. The paper was so easy that any body with a decent level of preparation could have cracked it. Now this decimates the line between the people who slogged their hearts out and the ones who just gave it a shot.Add to this the fact the most of the questions were repeated from previous years papers and previous slots and about 8000 had the option of giving CAT again( some 1.5 months later), CAT has in effect turned out to be a big lottery. All that I can do is hope that by divine grace I do manage to get a few calls.

After a lull of about 2 weeks after CAT I had to give JMET then followed by SNAP a week later. Given the fact that these exams are a lot more easier and I was looking to get into any of the top 2 or 3 colleges which accept these scores, an extremely good performance was required. I did put in a decent performance in SNAP, JMET though I felt I could have done a lot better. Then XAT followed a couple of weeks later and then FMS and then NMAT a month later.

In the first week of January the results of all these exams started to trickle in and I was faced with one disappointment after another. It was all a case of so near yet so far. The biggest disappointment was SNAP where I missed the boat by a mere half a mark and then XLRI which was again by a similar margin. JMET was another disappointment though I very much expected it. FMS and NMAT given my horrible show I am not even willing to check the results.

So what does the future holds for me now? I had quit my job too hoping to get a few calls and convert at-least one of them. So far the calls have been from IIFT and XIM B and I am expecting calls from a few IITs. A good result in CAT and a convert from any of these institutes is all that I can hope for as of now. Fingers crossed.