Admissions to IIM

chillibreeze writer — Kamini Kinger

I went to college at Shri Ram College of Commerce where taking CAT was a religion. Therefore, I never asked myself what I am about to ask you. Why do you want to get admission into an IIM in the first place?

Your preparation to get admission into an IIM begins with identifying exactly why you want to get into an IIM. Though confused students like myself, who decide to do an MBA simply because everyone else was doing it and because they knew they could, also get into an IIM, it always helps if you have your reasons clear. Because chances are that if you don't care much about doing an MBA and are just following the crowd, you might as well not waste your time. Cracking CAT is no easy task and you really do need to be committed to the cause.

Getting admission into an IIM is a 3-step process. The selection process consists of a written examination called the Common Admission Test (CAT), followed by a Group Discussion and a Personal Interview if you clear CAT. Do not fear. You do not have to be a genius or an academic topper to get through what might seem like an impossible goal. On the contrary, all you need is a logical flow of thought and an analytical mind and the IIM dream is yours to live.

Wisdom always comes easier when it comes in retrospection. If today I were to think about what it was in my preparation that really helped me crack CAT, I have a very tangible and definable answer for that. And so I would go on to suggest to you the same.

Join a coaching center. With the kind of competition that we are seeing today, you either join a coaching center to get professional guidance (especially if you are straight out of college), or be excellent with your basics as well as an extremely disciplined person. Some of the good coaching centers are Career Launcher, IMS, and Time coaching.
During the first 3-4 months, use your time extensively to understand each topic in depth and develop confidence on your subject. At this point, I would suggest you use Mock CAT scores only as an indicative tool to gauge which topics you are more or less comfortable with, and hence prepare accordingly.
Accept your limitations. For instance, if there is a topic that you just don't 'get', let it rest at that. Don't pursue it to its grave, wasting precious time that you could've spent on something more useful.
Build a good strategy. A strategy developed uniquely for you. You need to sit down and really take stock of what sections of the paper you are best at, good at, bad at and terrible at. You then need to allot yourself a limited time for each section depending upon the above classification, keeping in mind the fact that you need to pass the cut-off in each section. For example, I knew that I was very good at Reading Comprehension (RC) and Verbal reasoning and terrible at Quantitative Aptitude (QA). I therefore allotted myself the maximum time on QA and the minimum on RC when writing the paper. So develop a good strategy in consultation with your coaches (if you have any) to ensure that you spend the limited time that you have well. After all, as countless people would have told you, cracking CAT is all about time management.
Counting down to 45 days before the exam, I would suggest that you start writing Mock CAT regularly. For instance, my only preparation in the last 45 days was to give one Mock CAT every day. I would simulate the final CAT paper, testing my strategy and timing myself on each section. After having done that, I would go through the entire paper to see how I scored, and check the answers of each and every question that I could not solve.
During the exam itself, and pay close attention to this, ignore questions which take too long. It seems like a very simple thing but is extremely difficult to practice. When we start solving a quantitative question, a lot of us work on a high, confident that we can solve it. And this is where the trap lies. Just because you feel that the question at hand is one that you know you can solve, your objective changes from cracking the paper to solving that question. But please keep the ultimate objective in mind. What is more important is that the moment you feel that a particular question is taking you too long to solve, be brave and move on to another one. I know you can solve it, you know you can solve it, but that's not the point.

Once you have cracked CAT, the next step in the selection process is a Group Discussion (GD) and Personal Interview (PI).

You would start with a GD which is not elimination round. This means that you will give a PI irrespective of your performance in the GD round. The GD round usually consists of a group of 6-10 students. The panel remains the same over the GD and PI and usually consists of IIM Professors.

The topic in a GD is usually a general topic but can vary to just about anything under the sun. In terms of content, I think there is only limited preparation that an individual can do, other than reading and keeping himself updated on the current affairs. As long as you use logic when putting across an argument, even if the facts that you have used might have been stated by someone else, you will sail through. The panel is most interested in observing your flow of thought and a logical argument is sure to impress them. Also, it is important to take care of your body language, which should be alert and engaged in the discussion, even if you are not participating verbally at that moment. Listening effectively is as important a part of a discussion as speaking is. Moreover, sometimes the panel may ask one of the people in the group to summarize the discussion. So it's important to be attentive through-out the discussion. In fact, a lot of us get creative ideas from some of the things that other people say.

The last round of selection is the PI. Most of us have a tendency to view an interview as something where someone is sitting across from us and we are trying to convince them of something and get on the top. However, we can perform much better if we could just look at it as a conversation that we are having with some people sitting with us, who are interested in hearing our opinion on different things. They are not looking for reasons to reject us; instead they are actually looking for reasons to accept us into their academic institute. If you have made it this far, they do recognize that you have potential and have a very open stance instead of being the threatening monsters that you probably imagine them to be. Other than that, most of the principles which applied to the GD apply here as well. One additional thing is that you should prepare your content well for a PI. The content here consists of preparing your graduation subjects very well and understanding their application to some real world scenarios. Be confident and do not lie. If you don't know the answer to something, just say that. There is nothing wrong about not knowing something. At the same time it is very important to stay composed through out the GD and interview. One fear that a lot of college students have is what they are going to answer if they are questioned on their grades, in school as well as college. My recommendation would be to avoid being defensive, be very straight instead of either victimizing yourself or losing your composure. If they cared that much about your marks, they wouldn't have been wasting their time with this interview at all.

At the end, I would go back to what I was saying at the start. Most importantly, do spend some time thinking about why it is that you want admission into an IIM in the first place. Because it is very pointless to make all this effort and then, 10 years into your career, realize that you never meant to do this at all.

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—About our writer:

Kamini says, "I am an Economics graduate and an MBA from IIM Lucknow. My real passion, however, lies in travelling and film-making. I also enjoy writing on a plethora of topics which require me to share my opinions and experiences."

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