years now and try to create the right frame of mind and be an active learner. Go ahead; it is notas bad as it seems in the beginning!!When I was first asked to write, I was clueless as to what tips and expert comments do I give toeverybody to fare well in the examinations, but here I am completing almost an essay of sharingmy thoughts if not giving any advice!! All the best to everybody reading this. Remember, sky isthe limit!!! Just get up and rise! GATEway to M.Tech - Rutuja LawandGATE is Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering conducted by the IITs and IISCBangalore. It is a good option for students who want to pursue higher education inrenowned Indian Institutes and save upon Universities abroad. When I decided to optfor GATE, I got mixed reactions from people.1. There were many misconceptions and one of them was people thought you can onlystart an academic career as a lecturer after engineering post-graduation (and that is agood option btw). But believe me that’s not the only option. People who really want tostudy in IITs and NITs but couldn't crack JEE will get a second chance to do it. Alsocompanies in public sector services are using GATE scores to shortlist the candidates forlucrative jobs.2. Another reason I think is students often find GATE exam difficult. Unlike GRE andCAT, your technical knowledge will be tested and there are twelve subjects tostudy!!(For Electronics and Communication branch)GATE tests you at an all India level irrespective of college, University or state. Itprovides your technological standing at an all India level. To successfully tackle GATE,your commitment, planning and deep conceptual understanding of the subject isnecessary. For this I suggest, refer reference books only when you don’t understand theconcepts. Because each subject has at least three reference books and you cannot studyall the subjects from them! Don’t refer local author books as they may contain manymistakes. (You can pass in university exam using them but not GATE) You can refer
www.nptel.ac.in website where IITs have provided excellent study materials. Lecturesand notes from faculties of IITs are available free of cost and are very useful.GATE paper has two sections. First part is aptitude and general English. This sectioncarries 15 marks so try to score 15 out of 15. Second section is technical subjects. Startstudying with easier subjects like control systems, network theory and signals andsystems. It will give you confidence. Don’t go for too much theory as most of thequestions asked are numerical. For electromagnetic wave theory, go thoroughly throughconcepts. Another important subject is mathematics. Study it properly. It will give yousure shot marks. Solve as many problems as possible; they will help you with yourconcept and will develop your problem solving ability.25% of questions in GATE are value based questions where options will not be given.Answers will have to be entered as numerical value. Negative marking is not applied tothese questions.Time is an important factor in GATE. Take mock tests before exams so that you will getan idea about time management. See weightage given to subjects in previous questionpapers but don’t rely upon it as IIT is known for its surprise factor.While preparing for GATE you can simultaneously prepare for BARC, DRDO and IESexaminations. They have almost equivalent syllabus.There are various books available in the market. Books from ACE Academy Hyderabadare good and up to my knowledge error free. Solve all the question papers of previoustwenty years.Last but not the least, enjoy what you do. PLACEMENT - Urvi SharmaCollege time is probably one of the most stress-free periods of our life especially if wecompare it to high school where we somehow managed to juggle our time betweenschool/junior college and coaching classes and preparing for those limitless number of
entrance tests for admissions to various institutes. Of course, this is very much true forthe first three years of our life here but the fourth year mostly reminds us again of thesame old high school days when almost everyone around is gearing up forPlacements/CAT/GRE/GATE, with most of the students going for the first option. Weoften end up linking good grades with better placement prospects and opportunitiesforgetting that there is much more than just good marks that your recruiters look for inyou. Well, non-toppers, you can take heart, because your future recruiters seek manymore qualities than just a bunch of towering statistics in one’s mark sheets.For getting a job, there are many skills one needs to possess rather than beingperpetually and numbly obsessed over good grades. Your recruiters here will mostly befrom IT or Marketing based companies. So yes, the focus is more on your overall profilerather than just your scores. Let me warn you! You’ll still have to meet their basicminimum percentage requirement in order to sit for aptitude tests. I got an opportunityto sit for placements for 2 companies: TCS during semester 7th and IBM during semester8th; their basic minimum score requirement being 60% and 70% respectively. TCS wasan on-campus recruitment wherein I was exempted from writing an aptitude test (as itwas not required for top 5 students of each branch) but I had to sit for a languageassessment one whereas for IBM whose recruitment drive was conducted in PCCOEPune, I had to sit for both. On qualifying these, you have to give one interview or maybeeven two for them to test your HR, Technical and Management skills. During theseinterviews, there were a few things that I found matter the most and I am listing themdown in the order of their importance: Communication Skills: Like always, this is definitely ‘The Most Important’ thing. Nothing matters more. One does not need to use convoluted English words and sentences that may even leave your interviewer dazed but one needs to hold a capability to convey his/her ideas using minimum number of sentences in simple English with confidence (yes again, that’s very important). What you must do is read newspapers, magazines, novels and any good reading material you are able to find. Sitting for mock interviews and GD-PI sessions conducted by TNP cell is again very useful. Also you can get a list of probable job interview questions online and prepare the answers accordingly.
Off campus Internships and Projects: I did two internships with a couple of my friends. One during my winter vacations in Billdesk and the other during the July summer break in Sify Technologies Ltd. I learnt a bit about networking and programming in SQL during this period. That was quite a learning experience and added good weight to my resume. And since I had my friends along so we could always go out after 4 pm and see the places around so it was fun too. Get Involved on Campus: This is the best way to learn a number of skills and it’s definitely far from a boring job. I was a part of the marketing team during my third year and I still look back and cherish that time. You get to make a lot of friends and get a lot of useful experience at managing events and other things in college. Its best to work while you are in your second and third year because post that your fourth year does require a good amount of time for the preparation of those placement aptitude tests and other exams (if you are planning to give GATE/GRE/CAT too). TPPs/Project Competitions: Most of my time in the technical interview was spent discussing about my technical papers and final year project. Since the recruiters are not well informed about the syllabus of your specific branch and since they are interviewing students from various branches, your technical papers provide them with a good amount of matter to ask their questions from. Since it’s your technical paper, you know that you cannot expect interview questions better than these. Get a hobby: Important! Only for one thing and that is we cannot live in a bubble, content with what we are and not make an effort to grow and do different things. So this one for ‘Mann Ki Shanti’ and don’t worry, we have come across many students who have got their jobs singing their way through their interviews.Anyway, the most important thing is to understand what you need to do for the rest ofyour life. Define your dream and work hard towards it everyday. You cannot doeverything well at all times so you need to understand which one you want to excel at.So Dream big and Believe in yourself! The GREat Journey - Rishipal Singh Bhatia
Caveat: This article is about my journey which led me to score a 329 on 340 in my GRE. I am not aprofessional career counsellor or anyone who runs coaching classes. In fact, I find myselfcompletely unqualified and inept of providing any sort of academic guidance, and have written thisarticle solely upon the strong insistence of some friends. I hope it helps my juniors to plan their GREjourney.The Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) is a standardised test that is an admissionrequirement for most graduate schools in the United States, created and administeredby Educational Testing Service (ETS). I shall not discuss the format of the exams ormarks distribution as the official information can be found directly on the ETS(Education Testing Services) website.For people not interested in my back-story, motivation or those wish to know onlyabout preparation strategy that I used to crack the GRE, go directly to point #2.1. The back-story - Identification of Purpose and Setting your minimum-score goal.In my case, I had the clarity that if I have to do an MS, I would be trying for only aroundthe top 1 to 20 universities in my area of specialization. It is not to say that the lowerranked universities are not worth it, but compared to joining them I had many otherplans – a start-up idea that I was optimistic about, job opportunities from companieslike TCS (and later IBM too) and my NGO work about which I was passionate. Doing anMS would mean to give up all these extremely valuable prospects. Health was anothermajor concern, more so now with me having undergone a heart surgery recently. So, ifI’m in for an MS education, I want it to be from the best possible sources.Having set this criterion of joining only a top ranked university from the beginning, Irealised that I could not afford the risk to perform badly in my GRE. Also, when INR10,000/- were subtracted from my credit card account just for booking the GRE examslot, I knew that things had just got serious. I consulted with several career counsellorsand coaching classes(used up all free counselling sessions that they offer) and set mytarget to score a 320+ to be on the safer side.2. The Preparation
Although I had joined a popular coaching class for my preparations, I could not attendmost of it since the class timings clashed with my office hours during my internship inthe Mumbai Monorail project. So my actual preparation began only after the internshipended, giving me around 3 months.The GRE has three parts – Quantitative Analysis, Verbal Reasoning and AnalyticalWriting Ability (AWA). The preparations strategy varies from person to person but thefollowing things worked for me:For Verbal Reasoning:Here’s the toughest part of the GRE for us Indians. The verbal section demands anexceptionally good command over the English language and a wide and diversevocabulary which unfortunately most of the people tend to lack.Read. Read as much as you can. Read newspapers, articles, books and any piece of textthat you like. Reading the newspaper is one of the best ways to prepare for the ReadingComprehension part of the Verbal Reasoning section. Reading Comprehensionquestions of the GRE require you to read large pieces of text comprising of around 3-6paragraphs in a matter of just 60-90 seconds and answer the questions based on them.To tackle this problem, read point below carefully.How you read matters more than the reading itself. Practise smart reading. Usuallywhile reading any passage, the first one or two sentences of every paragraph provideyou an idea of what the paragraph more or less talks about. Once you know whattechnical details or information the paragraph will give you, stop reading it and go tothe next paragraph. So, let’s suppose that you read the 3rd paragraph and realise that itwill talk about an aspect X of the topic. Stop right there and move to the next paragraph.Map the passage in your head. If you read the point above carefully, you willunderstand that by following it, you will create a sort of a generic map of the passage.You know which part of the passage has information about which aspect of the topic.Now, when you read the question which asks you something about aspect X, you candirectly jump to the 3rd paragraph and obtain the answer quickly. You need not read thewhole passage again and this strategy helped me save a lot of time.
Learning the meaning of difficult words. One of the biggest regrets that I hold is nothaving learnt the meanings of important GRE words through wordlists. Learning wordmeanings would have certainly improved my Verbal score by around 3-4 marks. Whilereading newspapers, highlight the words whose meanings are not known to you. Takeefforts to open the dictionary and learn their meanings. Also, there are plenty of wordlists available in the market. Even books like Barron’s, Kaplan, Manhattan Prep, etcprovide word lists. I strongly recommend doing Barron’s 333 word lists for starters.Many questions in my verbal section were straight out of that list.Read the book “Word Power Made Easy” written by Norman Lewis. It gives you helpfultips about how to identify the meanings of the words using their roots.For AWA:Write as many sensible answers, passages or blog posts on online platforms likequora.com, edulix.com, thegradcafe.com and others. Write about something daily. (FBstatus updates do not count) Remember to time yourself, seek feedback and improve.For Quantitative Analysis:I won’t elaborate much for Quants. In Quant it’s only around 20-40% of the questionswhich are tough. Tough means that they are solvable but they consume time, whichunfortunately is a limited resource in the GRE. So, for Quant preparation, first identifyyour weak areas which consume more time. Once identified, only one thing remains tobe done – practise. That’s it. Pick up Barron’s, Kaplan and the ETS Official guide andsolve the examples given in them. My weak areas were geometry and statistics. Ipractised my weak areas so much that I almost began to solve them orally!The hard-work did pay off…I scored a 329 in my GRE. Q-170, V-159 and AWA-4. But having a good GRE score ishardly 20% of the work done towards your MS application procedure. Hence, alongwith my GRE score, I am grateful towards my project guide Dr. Alka Mahajan, Ms.Shubhangi Kharche (my favourite teacher) and my internship guide Mr. Chirag Singhal,for having sent their positive recommendations for me to the universities. With theirefforts and guidance, I have managed to secure admits from Carnegie Mellon University,
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