IIFT GD/PI

Venue: IIFT Bhawan, Delhi.
Time: 15th Feb, 2006, 9:30 AM.

Gave my first proper interview of the season yesterday.

I got there at about a quarter past nine, feeling very grown-up in my brand new black Van Heusen suit, black 'formal' shoes and pearl earrings stolen from my mother. I was clutching a black folder with my meagre collection of certificates filed inside. My parents wished me 'Best of luck' and I walked in. The guard directed me to the building in front, and I went straight through. A series of people directed me to a room on the first floor (it was actually the second floor, but the ground floor is called basement for some reason.) where there were a whole lot of other people sitting in tense anticipation.

I took my seat, signed the attendance sheet and was given a sheet of paper for the essay. There were still ten-fifteen minutes to go for 9:30, so I looked around at my other competitors. Most were in suits. The handful of girls were all in black suits, I noticed, except for a girl in a salwar-kameez. The girl next to me smiled and asked my name. I replied, but we didn't speak much after that. The minutes ticked by, with more people coming in.

Finally, at nine-thirty, a Professor came in, told us what we would be judged on (content, clarity of thought, and language) and gave us the topic - "Transformation of Indian Cinema." Brilliant, I thought, now what do I do? Couldn't they have given us something like SEZ's or M&A's or something? Anyway, I managed to write something or the other. Covered both sides of the sheet at any rate. Wrote about the challenges facing Indian cinema today - how Bollywood is often considered synonymous with Indian cinema, and also about censorship. I wrote the last word a second before the twenty minutes ended, so didn't have much time to proof-read.

Afterwards, we went to the rooms where we were supposed to have the GD's. The topic was "The Indian electronic media is highlighting trivial issues." There were eleven people in the group, nine guys plus two girls, and each of us was supposed to speak for a minute and a half on the subject first. I thought this would the worst part, but I did well enough. Didn't manage to finish my points though, so my speech didn't have too much structure.

The discussion itself was pretty much a disaster. We could have discussed so much - TV, radio, the internet, mobile content - but no, we chose to restrict ourselves to TV, and that too, to news channels. Some people tried to bring in new angles, but they weren't taken up, and the discussion kept jumping from one place to another to another and then back. We kept bringing up the same examples again, despite the moderator having told us in the beginning, after having listened to our speeches, that he expected us to go beyond the topic itself and discuss improvements and so on.

I did contribute, but couldn't express myself well at all. I'm so angry with myself, because I didn't use the one advantage I had over the others, which was my comfort with English. I kept being short of words for some reason. I used such cliched expressions and awkward phrases, that thinking of them makes me wince even now.

Afterwards, the interview. I was fifth in line, so didn't have to wait too long, because they have ten-fifteen minute interviews at IIFT. Don't want to do a post-mortem of that, because I'm convinced that the interview didn't put me in a good enough light at all. The very first question was about my poor marks, and I wasn't able to justify my results properly.

So in the final analysis, I don't think I'll get though, because my interview and GD were both pretty average. There are about 90 seats on offer at IIFT Delhi, and around 1100 calls, so the whole thing would have had to be pretty exceptional for me to get a final call, and it wasn't.

XAT results

If you think that this blog is turning into a place where I record all the calls I get - you're quite right! Cuz I have another! XAT results came out yesterday, and I got 99.67 percentile! Ha! Feline creatures of the world can go die for all I care!

Seriously, though - XAT was the best paper out of all the exams this year. CAT gave too much of an advantage to people good at quant, IIFT was a paper no one could make head or tail of, and SNAP was an insult to one's intelligence. XAT, on the other hand, was well-balanced and didn't give too much of an advantage to anyone. They even had a section on case studies, which I think is something a management exam should, ideally, have. Never mind that no one really attempted it. Also dude, they were giving out free coffee at my XAT centre! Just the thing on a cold winter morning. And the results were declared with in two weeks too! Unlike CAT which took a month and a half. And lest you think that this is sour grapes, I did get a call from IIFT and IIMA (a miracle, with 98.61 percentile) and I cleared the SIBM cutoff by twenty-three marks. (Good thing I didn't apply.)

Overall, the XAT results have left me quite content. Begone, feline monsters that told me I sucked at Verbal Ability! Begone, creatures that whispered that I couldn't do well just when it mattered!

As I posted on PagalGuy yesterday, if the way the institutes conduct their exams were a reflection of how good they are, God save the IIM's!

On Top of the World

If you'd asked me before November 19th, 2006 if I thought I would "bell" the CAT, I would have told you that I was confident of getting a ninety-nine percentile, but not of clearing all the sectional cut-offs.

Which goes to show why you must never ever think you "know" CAT. They removed the English Usage section, which was what used to get me a ninety-nine point whatever percentile, but the other sections went well, and I was hopeful, since no one seemed to be able to give the correct answer key for the English section.

I got a 98.6 percentile in CAT 2006. Cleared all the sectional cut-offs with above 96 in two sections and above 95 in one. I got to know the result yesterday, and I was absolutely down-in-the-dumps because it seemed to rule out the top three IIM's.

So today morning, my parents woke me up at six to check the IIMA call list. I got up reluctantly, because I "knew" that I wouldn't make it through. "Just tell us your registration number," they said. "We'll check it." Of course, I couldn't let them do that, and I checked it myself. But the page wasn't loading.

So I went to PagalGuy, to check what people were saying there. And on the IIMA call thread, I learnt that IIMA had mentioned the selection criteria (I suppose because they knew they would have to do it eventually, thanks to the RTI Act) - candidates whose percentile in each section was above 95.33 and who have an overall percentile above 98.3 have been called for the GD & PI. Oh man, I couldn't sit still after reading that!

But the page still wasn't loading! Ah, such agonizing minutes. But finally it did load, and I keyed in my number and date of birth, and TADA!

You have been short-listed for Group Discussion and Personal Interview for admission to PGP (2007-2009 batch), IIMA. You are requested to visit the website on or after January 10, 2007 to check for Interview date, time and venue.

You will receive our official letter soon.

Whee! Did I mention that I love the world? And all that's in it? Which includes you?

I don't care if I'm at a disadvantage among all those ninety-nine percentile engineers with work-ex. I'm a fresher and I got a call! 1,53,000 people wrote it, 608 people got calls in the General category, and I'm one of them. Damn, but this feels good.

First Call

The IIFT exam results came out yesterday and I got a call! How brilliant is that?

I was outside Venky, having lunch from one of those roll places, and Mani messaged me, "Congrats on IIFT." Very matter-of-fact and all, and I obviously couldn't believe it, because the exam had gone so badly. I told my friend, "I think I might have got through IIFT." And she was more excited than I was. I messaged him back immediately, "Seriously? You had better not have been joking, Mani." Yeah, that's how I message. But, bleh, I didn't get the delivery report for another fifteen minutes, and by then I'd decided to just call him up and ask and he said, "Haan, haan, yaar. Maine dekha hai tera naam." Or something to that effect. Whee! I didn't do a little jig at the bus stop but it was a close thing.

So this is the first call I'm getting. And I feel so happy about it. I love the world and it loves me! I think I'm so happy mostly because the paper hadn't gone too well. You know how it is - you build up for CAT on the nineteenth, and after it there's this deflated 'that's it?' sort of feeling, and you're sleep-walking through the week, rather than studying for the IIFT paper next Sunday. During the paper, I was just attempting the questions I felt like attempting, rather than the ones it would have been smart to attempt.

CAT results come out on the second, and SNAP results on the eighth, and both of those went better than IIFT. Though it's the comparative performance that matters, of course. Nineteen thousand people gave the paper, and eleven hundred have cleared it, and now there's the GD/PI process left. But I don't really want to think about that right now. This feeling - it's so nice and warm.

CAT 2006

So right, yeah, CAT 2006. I'll just analyse it once in this post, and everyone who gave it, or is planning to give it, can read it, and then I'll resume regular programming. If I feel like it.

So you've all read that bit about CAT changing its stripes and so on. Seventy-five questions this time, as opposed to ninety last time and a hundred and twenty-three the time before. (And other shudder-inducingly high numbers before that.) The whole pattern had changed. No variable marking, which was a boon as far as I was concerned. Straight four marks for each answer, as opposed to the usual one- and two-markers. And only one mark cut for each negative answer. Big "whew!" at that.

My centre was in Daryaganj, in a school called, of all things, Happy School. It turned out to be not as shady as I thought it would be. Nice single desks - non-creaky ones too, which is about all that I ask of a desk with such a crucial role in my life. In fact, it kind of reminded me of a desk I used to have when I was a kid. It had a liftable lid, with space inside where you could keep your books and stuff.

Anyway, we got the answer sheets at ten, and I noticed the five options thing straight away. I wasn't really worried, though, because I was too busy feeling relieved at the fact that the sheet only had space for one-twenty answers. We got the question papers at ten-twenty, and I read the instructions, and barely stopped myself from gasping aloud. Twenty-five marks in each section, four marks to each answer - the paper was out of three hundred! I remembered that the prospectus had said that we needed to score at least one-fourth of the total marks in the sections. Twenty-five out of hundred seemed managable enough.

So everyone who has read till now must now that the English section was devilishly tough - three Reading Comprehension passages with five questions each, five paragraph completion questions and another type of question that I'd never seen before, but apparently used to come many years before. And not only did all the questions require actual application of your brain, but the options were so close that, even when you tried the elimination of options method, you were left with at least a couple of possible answers. And my predicament was even worse than others'. Because I usually score well in the vocabulary and grammar based questions. But there wasn't a single one of those this year. In one stroke they'd removed the stuff that I was actually good at, and put in the stuff that I'd been averaging fifty percent accuracy in, in the Mocks.

I finished off the English section as best as I could, and moved on to Maths. And boy, did it raise my spirit! Every question was easy! I attempted thirteen and got twelve right. And I would have scored even more, except for my inability to believe that the questions could be so easy.

Then, with an hour left, I moved onto DI, which was midway between Maths and English in terms of difficulty level. I attempted eighteen questions, got at least thirteen correct. Think I got one more correct, but only one coaching institute seems to agree with me. Thank you, God, for letting me 'get' that mathematical conference set. I feel so proud of myself for that one. 'Should have been avoided' was the suggestion most experts gave about that set, but whoo, I got that one right!

And that was it. Two and a half hours later, I was out. Feeling pretty content with myself too, though I had no idea about how others had done, of course. Since then, I've been both down in the dumps, and ecstatic, depending on which answer key I choose to believe. Still - at the end of the day, it's the IIM answer key that counts, as I read in some forum or the other, and I'll have to wait till January to find out. Meanwhile, though, I'm basking in the glory of having done much better than anyone in my class - which is not saying much, by the way, since All Mathsies Suck At English (proved via extensive research). It has raised my stock to dizzying heights. (Is this what's called mixing of metaphors, by the way?) Most gratifying.