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Showing posts with label CAT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CAT. Show all posts

Thursday, December 4, 2008

E & C Counselling(Careers in Leather Industry, business consultant, Computer and Geography, MBA after BTech, Operations Management, Other careers related to medicine,

EDUCATION & CAREER COUNSELLING






















Computer and Geography











MBA after BTech







Operations Management









Other careers related to medicine








   Sunil Sharma
    Moderator
Dil Se Desi Group
              &
www.dilsedesi.co
at 10:25 PM 1 comments
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The Counsellor - 31

THE COUNSELLOR




Looking ahead 

I am a BSc (biology) graduate. I wanted to get into a medical college but my family's financial condition is not so good. So instead, I will have to now look at opportunities in related medical fields. Please tell me other options, which are good for me.    

Ajmer Kumar

So what if you couldn't do an MBBS! When one door closes, ten windows open up. There is so much else you could do related to the medical field. You can do a one-year course in medical technology, medical lab technology, radiology, radiography, imaging technology, biotechnology, medical microbiology, forensic science or even a course in clinical research or bioinformatics. Should you wish to start earning right away, you can join a good pharmaceutical or nutraceutical company as a sales executive and work your way up. Medical transcription and working with a KPO in the life science space is yet another option. 

Maths phobia 

Like many, I am also in race for CAT exam this year. Even after three months of revision, I have not been able to overcome my maths phobia. What should I do? 
   

Prya Raj


Mathematical ability is a mechanical and logical process. It is mechanical because once you understand the method for solving a particular kind of problem you will always get it right; unless you slip up in the calculation part, which is even more mechanical. 
   Maths phobia is a very real and fairly common phenomenon. The only way to tackle this fear is to relearn your maths from the basics. Understanding various methods and practicing their application will help cure you of this phobia. Once you've understood the fundas and practised the basics, maths will become mechanical; and will therefore, be both speedy and accurate. Remember: the exam does not attempt to test you on solving a third degree differential equation. It does, however, expect you to know how to calculate distance and speed. 
   For the math-phobic, I extend my personal guarantee that you will overcome this bugbear — provided you begin at the beginning and pace yourself for the race. 
   If necessary, engage a good tutor to teach you the basics at your pace and on level of understanding — and give up feeling sheepish, shy or ashamed of asking for detailed and silly-sounding explanations of obvious problems. Keep at it till you understand the method. The level of mathematics is not very high (essentially of class 10 level with a few topics other than calculus like progression, permutation-combination (algebra), probability (statistics) and Set Theory (Venn Diagrams). If you had enough time, you would probably manage to crack most of the questions. However, time being the most constraining factor in this exam, not to mention the negative marking, you need to master speed. And that only comes with knowing the basics and constant practice. Taking regular mock tests also helps. 
   Obviously, if you are beginning from scratch and not just brushing up on what you already know, so you need to give yourself a little longer than what MBA aspirants usually allot to preparation. But don't worry, you will eventually find your own pace and catch up with all the hares out there.

 



Shooting right 

I have been very fascinated with shooting since I was a kid. How should I start my career in shooting? Where can I get training? 
   

 Vijay Prakash


Shooting, as a career seems to be bang on target ever since Major Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore's triumph at the Olympics in Athens. It has further grown in popularity with Abhinav Bindra doing us proud by bagging India's very first Olympics Gold at Beijing. 
   While a few elite schools and colleges have shooting facilities, aspiring marksmen can begin practicing at local sports clubs and ranges in several major cities. You will need to check if there is a 
local shooting range in your city where you can get started. 
   A number of schemes are offered by the government for training marksmen and cash incentives are offered to medal winners. But notwithstanding its soaring popularity, shooting is generally regarded an expensive sport which only the affluent, powerful and the talented with institutional support can pursue as a serious career. While shooters like Abhinav Bindra and Gagan Narang come from affluent families (Abhinav has the luxury of an air-conditioned indoor range in his backyard), others like Rajyavardhan Rathore are decorated Indian Army officers (Vishisth Sena Medal). 
   The expenses are a major inhibiting factor, which is why most of the earlier shooters belonged to royal families. A second hand air pistol for example can cost upwards of Rs 80,000 (the best are Austrian); a standard pistol Rs 1.5 lakh while trap shooting is exorbitantly expensive as the shotgun itself costs Rs 3-4 lakh. Ammunition costs are prohibitive. Besides, the equipment and rifle, gear including jacket pants and shoes can vary from event to event and cost anything between Rs 15,000 to Rs 3 lakh for rifle shooting. 
   Ironically all the top 25 ranked players in India get an eligibility certificate from the Sports Federation of India to import the weapon of their choice (although no financial assistance is given). The certificate is valid for one year and more often than not it takes about as much time to get the certificate. 
   Aspiring marksmen can begin practicing at local clubs and ranges that are registered with the rifle association. You will need to check if there is a local shooting range in your city where you can get started. 
   Incidentally we have so much undiscovered and uncelebrated talent in India, score of Abhinavs in the making, not to mention this 80-year woman from Baghpat village who is now representing India in international events trained by Dr Rajpal, an ace shooter himself. 
   Some training centres in North India: 
   
National Rifle Association of India (NRAI): 

It is the central administrative body for promoting shooting sport in India. It is affiliated to the International Shooting Sports Federation (ISSF), the apex body of shooting sport. NRAI has a network of 46 State Rifle Associations/Units all over India, and holds national level competitions in Rifle and Air Pistol events 
   
Dr Karni Singh Shooting Range, Tughlakabad (near Delhi): 

It has good infrastructure for this sport (10 m air pistol shooting range is air conditioned, the 50 m outdoor range 
   
Siri Fort Sports Complex: 

It has two shooting ranges of international standards (For Members. Also Pay and Play: Rs 250 per hr and Rs 2 per pellet) (Rs 500 for a box of 300/500). 
   
Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar: 

The only Indian university to have an international standard indoor shooting range (22 shooters can shoot at a time) 
   
NIS, Patiala: 

Encouraged by Bindra's golden feat the NIS, Patiala has drawn up plans for a full-fledged shooting range, both indoor and outdoor.

 



At par? 

While working as a steno since last year, I am pursuing MBA through distance education. Will I face any kind of discrimination in the job market against the regular MBA candidates? 
   

SukhDev Singh


Distance MBAs don't offer the quality, depth and over-all exposure necessary to impress employers. No matter how good, these programmes are, there is no substitute for a regular programme. 
   Besides, a regular full-time MBA from a reputed B-school offers the attraction of on-campus recruitment. 
   MBA courses offered through distance learning are usually preferred by working professionals to upgrade their qualifications for better growth prospects, particularly those working in the government sector. 
   Naturally since no placement facilities are offered for students of part-time or distance learning programmes, you will have to look for a job on your own. Try to leverage your work experience if any in the best way possible. 
   Management is essentially a practical hands-on discipline rather than a mere academic field of study. So while you'll gain in professional knowledge, you must be missing out on classroom interaction, dissection of case studies and the opportunity of networking with your peers, professors and visiting faculty, which form an essential core of a regular MBA programme. Try and relate what you are studying to the work you are doing. That way, you will be able to talk about it more eloquently during your job interview. 
   Also make sure you are regular with your study and assignments. The dropout rate of distance programmes tends to be pretty high. Rowing two boats at the same time is not always easy. After a hard day at work, it’s tough to sit down to regular study in the evening or night — month after month. It is why not many of those who enroll in correspondence or part-time courses end up completing them. 
   You'll need to be extremely focused, disciplined and motivated to submit your assignments on time and take the exams regularly. Tough certainly, but not impossible. 
   Yes, you may find it a bit of a problem in your first job, but use it as a base and prove your worth.

  

  Sunil Sharma

    Moderator

Dil Se Desi Group

             &

www.dilsedesi.org

at 10:02 PM 0 comments
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Thursday, November 13, 2008

CAT - How to Perform Under Pressure

TAMING THE CAT

 

MANAGING PRESSURE IS THE CRUCIAL DIFFERENTIATOR THAT SETS CHAMPIONS APART WHEN IT COMES TO ACING THE CAT.  HANDY TIPS THAT ENABLE YOU TO PERFORM WELL EVEN UNDER PRESSURE

 


   Competitive exams like the CAT can often prove tougher than they actually are owing to the pressure that inevitably builds up. There is a major difference between being able to solve a question in practice and being able to execute the same solving process under intense pressure. This is the only reason why many underperform in the exam. The dominant emotion in the hour after coming out of the CAT examination for almost all candidates is –“How did I miss this logic?” or “Why was I not able to think this way inside the examination hall?” Students who have started taking mock exams have probably already experienced this. 
   Look at it in the context of how just five to seven more questions solved correctly could make the difference between a 70 percentile and a 99 percentile result and how most 70 percentilers never believe that they have it in them to make it. Perhaps if you could learn to be able to perform despite the pressure, you too would be able to make this jump. 
   Using sport as an analogy of a pressure situation, you would realise that there is a difference in the level of pressure when the big points are on. For instance, give 100 club level tennis players a tennis ball and ask them to serve and you would see that perhaps a lot of them would be able to hit aces, but ask them to do it at a 15-40 point in a Wimbledon final- and you would need a Federer or a Rafael Nadal to do it. Or for that matter throw a cricket ball to your average batsman and you would be hit for a six by many, but you would require a champion batsman when the whole world is watching and six runs are needed off the last ball to win a world T-20 final. 
   The point here is that you should recognise the difference between performing under pressure and performing when the stakes are low. The transition from being good at something and being a champion, is the rare ability to perform under pressure. 
   The obvious question that arises then is: 

“What does one do?” From your past behaviour patterns check how you have performed under pressure in the past. Principally there are only two types of reactions to pressurea) Pressure improves performance:

 

If you have this rare ability consider yourself blessed- all champions that have ever lived in this world had this ability. 
b) Performance dips when you are under pressure- This is the normal bad habit that most of us pick up during our formative years. If you belong to this category, you really need to undergo a transmutation otherwise you will only be able to solve 50-70% of what you know when you take the CAT.

 

Second: Elevate the level of your performance, elevate the 
level of your work quality, and create an obsession for excellence in your life 
   The secret to making this transition is to think in terms of time frames. When do you need to become great? When do you need to create an obsession for excellence? When do you need to elevate the level of your work, your life? 
   The answer: You only need to do it for the next five minutes. And then the next five, and then the next five… 
   You have 288 five minute time frames in a day to live. Dhirubhai Ambani said once that if someone says that he works 15 hours a day he is lying. Great champions are able to use about 120-140 five minute time frames in a day. 
   Who can stop you from being the greatest individual you can be for the next five minutes? Only yourself! Stop being serious about your results, start being sincere about your work. This simple shift will take you a long way. 

 

Third: Ensure that you take your learnings to the point where they become your reaction — your reflex, ie the unconscious competence level. 
   Remember, pressure does not affect your reflexes. Pressure can only play tricks with your mind when you ask your mind to 
think. If you are responding to questions in CAT through reflex-based thought processes rather than thought out thought processes, pressure will not affect you. 
Thus, while you can trust yourself to do 12+17 even under pressure, your trust on your ability to calculate something like 27×44 under pressure would obviously be much lower. 
The tragedy for most aspirants is that they prepare only to the point of knowing something. If you want to bell the CAT you need to reach a point in your preparations where you not only know, but you also know that you know. 


 

Sunil Sharma

   Moderator

Dil Se Desi Group

&    www.dilsedesi.org

at 7:13 PM 0 comments
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CAT Exams - Recognise Your Errors

CAT CONTROL

 

THE FIRST STEP TO CRACKING THE CAT IS TO LEARN TO RECOGNISE AND OVERTURN YOUR ERRORS


    CAT preparation is at its peak for most 2008 aspirants. 
In the last two articles, we focused on questions that appeared in the CAT 2007 quants section and the ways in which we could solve them. It was apparent that simple logical processes would have overcome seemingly very tough processes. 

 

   In this article, we focus on a very crucial matter, which if adequately dealt with, can help you improve your test scores. 

 

   It is understood that it is extremely important to be dedicatedly taking practice tests at this time. In fact, it is imperative that you realise that the CAT prep is actually divided into two parts. Remember: Each part is as important as the other - 

 

(a) Conceptual development- Through conceptual development, a student can focus on developing a strong theoretical background in each of the three sections of the exam. 

 

(b) Test taking: Any preparation for CAT cannot be complete without a significant number of tests taken by the student. The minimum recommended number would be around 30 to 40 tests. The more, the better. 

 

   In fact, while there are a lot of aspirants who are able to crack the CAT and acquire admission to the IIMs or other good management institutes without doing (a), it is extremely rare to come across someone who has cracked the CAT and made it to the IIMs without doing (b). Thus, look at it this way. Ideally, a student’s CAT preparation should be about (a) and (b) mixed in a proper fashion, but if you are only doing one, (b) is compulsory, especially if you are good with the basics. 

 

   Obviously, a lot of students out there have already started to take tests. It is also very obvious that many of these students will be very concerned about the range in which they might be scoring in these practice tests. The key question students will be facing at this point of time, would be: 
“What do I do in order to develop my test scores?” 

 

   Also, if you are scoring, say, 50 percentile in your tests now, does it mean that you are on your way to a third-level B-School? Does it mean that the cherished dream that you have always had of getting into the IIMs is going to remain exactly that - a pipe dream? 

 

   Absolutely not. Contrary to popular perception, taking a jump from 50 percentile to 99 percentile need not be related to how much you study. You could easily do it with some smart working on your part. 
So what must you focus on? 

 

A critical issue in CAT preparations is the ability to overturn errors. In the current context of the CAT (last two years), where individual questions have carried four marks for a correct answer, and -1 for an incorrect answer, the net result of an error was five marks. As we have already mentioned in our previous articles in this series, just five errors overturned would give you an additional 25 marks, taking you from 60 percentile to 90 percentile levels. 

 

Refer to the article a few weeks ago, where we had defined your score improvement potential - viz by defining three types of questions: 

 

a) How many silly errors did you make in the exam? Let the number of such silly errors be A. 

 

b) How many questions did you read in the exam for which you remembered the answers only after you left the hall? Let the number of such questions be B.

 c) How many questions did you not read in the exam, but knew the answer when you saw them after the paper? Let the number of such questions be C. 
 

 

  An individual’s total score improvement potential would be given by A×5+ B×4+C×4. 
    So the obvious question would be: How do I achieve this score improvement? 
Let us focus on the first of these categories - taking care of silly errors. The first thing you should realise is that silly errors can further be defined into three broad types: 

i)   Errors of calculation: One of my students (an IIT alumnus) committed the error of calculating 3x3 = 6 in his CAT. The result? A drop of five marks in net scores, leading to a crucial percentile drop. Obviously, these errors would be committed in the QA and DI sections only. 

ii) Process-based silly errors: A single-step error in solving a question. Again, obviously an error that would be committed in the QA and DI sections only. 

iii) Over reading errors: Questions you get incorrect due to the fact that you did not read it properly. This error might occur in any of the three sections, including English. Your preparation plan should include processes to overturn each of these three categories. 
 

 

  Issue 1: Tackling calculation errors - How do you explain an IITian making an error like 3×3 = 6? Does he not know this? Obviously, there are explanations outside the ordinary, which induce such errors. This is what makes the CAT tough (If you recollect, in the last few articles, we have been concentrating on demonstrating why the CAT paper is actually easy). 

 

   When an IIT topper can be induced to make such errors, what would happen to a normal student? 
 

 

  The first and foremost thing you should realise while preparing is that when you are taking the CAT, the entire potential of your brain will not be available to you. Your mind will be in such a state that you might be forced to even check 2+2. 
 

 

  So remember, the basic principle is that if in your normal day to day preparation, you can do something by using an excess of 80 to 90% of your mind’s capacity, you would not be able to execute that thinking in the CAT paper. 
 

 

  What you need to realise is that unless you train yourself to be able to execute your thought processes under intense unrelenting pressure, any preparation for the CAT, by and large, makes no sense. 
   In our next article in this series, we will throw more light on this issue. 
   

 

Sunil Sharma

   Moderator

Dil Se Desi Group

&    www.dilsedesi.org

 

at 6:50 PM 0 comments
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