No, they can’t. Nor can they do any other extraordinary feat. But I used to think they could. And I’m guessing I’m not the only one. The huge number of students appearing CAT, the elusive 99 percentile cutoff, the obscene salaries being paraded around in newspapers, all contribute to that overall feeling that people who do eventually get in must be something special. Well, flattering as it may seem, it’s not the truth. Like anything else in life, all it takes is hard work, dedication and yes, one or two large dollops of luck.

I am not a genius. Never have been & never will be. Other than a 8 part test series I have stayed away from classes. The only notes I’ve referred to are the three years old Xeroxed notes of a friend (Thanks for that Himanshu. And I’m sorry u lost the original notes on my account!!) So how did I make it? Well, it was a rocky ride, and if you’re interested, here goes.

CAT 2004 was the first CAT I attempted. My degree exams had gotten over earlier that July, and I had taken up a job as a project coordinator in a web-designing firm. In between working as a trainee (frankly, not much work pressure there) I handled my CAT preparations.

Wouldn’t it have been simpler giving CAT while doing engineering? If your college is lenient (or at least a bit flexible) about your submission dates and absenteeism isn’t frowned upon too much, then yes. Ideally I should have given my CAT while in the final year but this was just not possible in our college and only a few hardy souls like Himanshu managed it. Not without incident of course. But that’s a different story.

I remember having practiced some papers and analyzing those had provided me with my strategy for d-day. One thing was that my strategy was very general and didn’t get very specific. It just dealt with how much time I was going to spend on each section, depending on the paper format (not that it helped me much).

By September it was clear that I was very poor in maths. My verbal skills were great and DI and LR didn’t pose much of a problem either. So post September I only concentrated on maths. By this time I had also realized that I was doing exceptionally well in verbal. So much so that I decided to reallocate part of my time for verbal during CAT to Maths. And it was with this strategy that I went in for CAT on November 21st, 2004.

One habit that I carry over from my engineering days is to study the faces of people who get the question paper before you do. There would be those inevitable looks of disbelief, people giving each other wry smiles in the fashion of concentration camp prisoners who have made their peace and accepted their fate and of course there would always be that one guy making neck slashing movements with his hand at everybody and mouthing, ‘main fail’.

That day when I saw people’s faces, I immediately knew the paper pattern had changed. A pattern change is always expected but there are always people who keep hoping that it will only happen to ‘someone else’. Those people and everyone whose strategy was pattern dependent suffered in adapting. Since I wasn’t burdened with a detailed strategy I faced no such problem.

I finished off my DI section and went into my Verbal section and found myself on a roll. It wasn’t a surprise though; I was expecting nothing else. What was surprising was the adrenaline surge that hit me at this point. A small part inside of me had always wondered whether I’d be able to continue my performance into the actual paper. As soon as I saw that I could, my ego took over. The temptation to dazzle friends with an amazing verbal score was too hard to resist. I didn’t stop before time and kept solving verbal for its whole allotted time. I didn’t know it then but one and half hours into the paper I was already out of running for CAT.

My final scores: DI-90.22%ile, Verbal-99.38%ile, Maths-69.46%ile, Overall: 97.22%ile. Obviously, I didn’t get a single call.

Bitterly disappointed, I pulled out my Xeroxed notes again. I decided to take CAT one more time, this time fill out the form for every institution and take any that would have me. Thankfully, it didn’t come to that.