Preparation for GD/PI – Tips (2)

This post was supposed to be out about two weeks back but the extremely hectic and busy schedule forced me to postpone it to this date.

Step 3: Content
So after you are thorough with Steps 1 and 2(as described in first post of this series), you are almost ready for the personals part of the interview and now need to focus on building content for the talks.

At this point, I would like you to think over it for a moment – What is it that you “must” know? What is it that you “should” know? and What is it that you “may/may not” know to talk sensible in a discussion or an interview?

Clearly there are no defined rules for preparing for content. Nobody knows what is it that you will be asked in an interview so the scope of topics is unbounded and limitless. If we can classify the topics in above three categories, we can save sometime by not doing things which are less important. We can prioritise must dos over should dos.

Again the classification also has no defined rules. Only a general set of guidelines. For an example, there are a few things that are more likely to be asked in an interview like your work experience, some recent happenings in the related industry, some theory related to what you have done etc. Similarly topics from your UG which may not be directly related to your field of work or topics from your desired field of specialisation may be asked and then you have topics which are remotely related to you or are highly technical to the field of your UG etc., which are not very likely to be asked. Based on my experience and observations, I can prescribe you an order of readings, which I strongly suggest you to change to adopt to your particular case. I suggest you follow 3-1-4-5-6-2 or 3-1-4-5-2-6 (where 1=Newspaper, 2=Magazine, 3= Work-ex related, 4=Academics, 5=Interview experiences, 6=PG articles)

1. Read Newspapers properly
Spend atleast 2 hours daily to those 20 odd yellow pages. I can tell you those will come really handy in GDs and PIs. You may go through Economic Times or Business Standard for this purpose. Business Line and Financial Express would be a bit too much for new readers so you may avoid those at this stage. Business page of TOI is good as well but not sufficient at all. Do not waste much time on Sports page. You may like to refer to editorials to gain new perspectives on the topics of discussion, which may be useful for Group Discussions but otherwise the knowledge gain there is very limited.
Note that this is a daily activity and above given order for this activity is just to represent its importance.

2. Magazines
Scan through a few magazines of your choice(General/Business) to get an idea of what’s going around in the world. Dont spend too much time on magazines. The purpose is to be aware of national/global happenings.

3. Work Experience
Arguably one of the most important component of your Personal Interview. Since you are already doing the job, I’ll assume you know how to do it but for the purpose of interview, you are expected to know the theory behind those things as well. Also, in case of large teams working on a project, you can’t get away by saying that others in my team were looking up this issue and I was not involved(unless very domain specific issues are there). Now since you are aspiring to be a management student, you must have been thinking about the practical applications and new innovative uses of the project you are doing. If not then start thinking as you are expected to be knowing that if you are genuinely motivated to get into B-school.

4. Academics
If I say, preparing academics is a nightmare for people in jobs, it would not be an overstatement. It must be noted down that preparing academics well is must for a fresher(a person with no prior work experience) and the importance of knowing academics well goes down with the number of years of experience. Although it must not be taken as a sacrosanct statement for there have been instances where candidates with 6-7 years of experience had their interviews totally based on their academic courses.
While preparing for academics you may like to prepare well for 1-2 interesting(*interesting in managerial language is generally interpreted as something of practical use and yet not very popular in people) courses and the courses related to your field of experience. To take an example, a person with IT experience in ‘development’ should know the concepts of structured programming and object oriented programming well. You know which courses can be related to your field of work, so give high importance to those. In that sense, acads and work experience are not mutually exclusive.
Another very important point to note over here is that interviewer’s perception of your field of work may not exactly match the actual work you do. To save your face in such cases, it would be good if you can get some basic understanding of fields of those possible wrong interpretations. To give an example, I worked as mobile solutions developer but during many interviews, interviewer interpreted mobile solutions as embedded programming. They are different.

Basically, in academics the target is to do certain related courses well and a basic understanding of a lot of courses.
A special tip for people with B.Tech./B.E. in communications or related field(Electronics/Electricals/ICT) – Prepare well for course on Radio Frequency and Radio waves. You will find a lot of interviewers obsessed with obsessed with RF,AM/FM etc.

5. Read previous year Interview experiences
A lot of people write their interview experience on their personal blog and PagalGuy. Go through those to discover all that I have written. [:-)]

6. Read articles on PG
In case you still have sometime left, just go through articles on PG. They generally have some articles on recent world happenings to make candidates more acquainted to the topics and intricacies involved. This might help in Group Discussions/Personal Interviews.

Step 4: Practice
The Last and very important step is to practice.
Any speech, no matter how short or long, without modulations is boring and ineffective. Relate it to listening to a song or a movie. A speech with proper modulations engages audience and force them to listen to you. It is not the decibel level that gets you a chance in Group Discussion, it is the modulation level. If you speak flat then rest assured, somebody will cut it off in between and others will support him/her. Make it interesting for others to listen to and you will emerge as a leader of the group. Similarly, in an interview, it is equally important to keep the interviewer interested in you and your talk.

I’ll try to put on another post in this series, covering Do(s) and Dont(s) for GD/PI. Keep checking Abhi’s space.

~Direct feed from Abhi’s world.
~~For more interesting posts, visit http://abhitaneja.blogspot.com

Thank you

Preparation for GD/PI – Tips (1)

STEP 1: GETTING TO KNOW YOURSELF

You have taken the first step but the winner is one who walks till the last step.

Are you a winner?

What makes a winner?
It is simple. A winner is one who has a good aptitude (and can adopt according to situations), who has a firm determination, who has a good luck and very importantly he/she has access to more resources than others.

People might ridicule but this is what is the fact of life. You need to be more resourceful to succeed in this world. Talent takes you till certain points..from there it is you and your chances. (These chances come from luck and resourcefulness, so do not undermine this important aspect)

Anyways that was just a passing thought…might be useful for many of you but the real motive of this post is to help you with some GD/PI prep tips.
First, I claim no expertise in this but having gone through a number of GD/PI (s), I can talk a bit from my experience.

Personal Interview:
Why do they take personal interviews?
First and foremost it is important to understand the basic purpose of an interview. Interviews are conducted to get to know you – this is what you must have heard a number of times – but this is actually only half part of the story. Interviews are conducted to get to know you and to see how well does the person matches with the requirements of the organisation (in this case IIMs) and to see the potential benefits that the organisation would have if the person is selected. IIMs conduct GD/PI also to check whether the person can sustain the academic pressure and rigour of a B-School.
And believe me, expectation levels are very high. All of you are expected to be achievers and these things will get more clear to you when you join any of the top 3 B-schools in the country (IIM- A,C,B).

IIMs expect a person to be academically oriented with very strong extra-curricular achievements and having held significant Positions of Responsibilities. In simpler language that should sound like scoring 90% in Boards, CPI equivalent to 80% in Graduation(preferably from IIT), a few international publications, Played a few sports at national level, Won a few competitions at national level, President of your college council and played Captain atleast a few times.

If that scares you, it is fine. But that is just a set of expectations and nothing can be done about it but what can be done about is to get to know yourself well. Believe me, all of us have done something or else in life which can makes us stand out in the crowd. We generally ignore those things thinking those to be trivial but any achievement that you have had till now could turn things in your favour(You never know). The idea is to get as close to those expectations level as we can get.

Examples of a few trivial (as you thought) yet important achievements:

1. You stood among top Three in class in your school in classes 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9.. (So what!!) — Consistently stood among Top Three for Nine consecutive years (Now what do you think)
2. You initiated some club in your college (Yeah thats fine..I did it coz I liked doing it) — Founder Member, xyz club @ xyz college (Why not take some credit for things you have done)
3. …
4. ..

The above two examples are just two symbolic examples..there can be many more cases like this and with variety of types.
My suggestion – Collect all your certificates first..compile a list..Send over the list to a few knowledgeable people and let them decide which all points should and should not be there.

STEP 2: GETTING TO KNOW YOUR REASONS FOR DOING MBA

Now this is very important. I don’t know how many people would actually be knowing why do they want to do an MBA. I can say this without any disclaimers that majority of the people out there preparing for GD/PI (s) would say MONEY!! If that is your reason, it is fine but what would you like to do?
You people are gonna be managers and if you are so short-sighted, I have my doubts on a lot of things.
Get in touch with some of your friends, your seniors, your acquaintances who are doing MBA/who have done MBA and get to know the profiles on offer. Then, do some proper study to get an unbiased view of that. Evaluate all the options and decide which one you would like to go for. “Why?” would follow by itself.
You will be asked this question in almost all the forms and in almost all the interviews. This answer believe me is very important for you to get through Interview Process.

Draft your answer and again get in touch with knowledgeable people to review those answers. 5-6 revisions should make if an ok-types answer.

The next step is to Prepare Content – To be posted in Next Post -Tips (2).

~Direct feed from Abhi’s world.
~~For more interesting posts, visit http://abhitaneja.blogspot.com

Thank you

Again, the same time of year

It is again the same time of the year when some cannot express their happiness while some cannot express their discontent. Everybody is tense..no matter happy or sad.
Yes it is the CAT results again!!

First of all hearty congratulations to all those who cleared the first hurdle. Now if you think that tough times are over, sympathies for you are there as well. Getting through CAT is the easiest and it only gets tough from here. You had 7-8 months to prepare for CAT, you will have less than 2 months to prepare for GD/PI. You had a course outline for CAT, sky is the limit for GK. You improved your quanty skills in a few months, now improve your verbal skills in a few days!

My purpose is not to scare you out of this GD/PI process but to prevent you from getting smug. It is not uncommon that people kill their chances by thinking, “i have 6 calls..i am not that bad a person..kahin na kahin to ho hi jayega”. What you need to realise is that those 5 or 6(or whatever) calls you have, they are independent of each other, each of which requires a decent amount of effort to be put in. You have got a really good opportunity with this and I do not want you to let go this opportunity like that.

Now our friends who could not make it through this time:
I do not sympathize with you because you do not need any sympathies. You have got another opportunity to think whether or not you want to do an MBA. It is not that MBA is good for all. Some people are just meant for MBA some are not. Try to find out what you want to do exactly in life and then see if MBA happens to be in line. All those who got calls, do not have that option to think now. You are lucky at least in that aspect. I am not saying these for the sake of saying. I actually mean it. This might sound like yet another consoling message but believe me it is not. The very fact that you have not lost anything at all makes the word consoling more than redundant.
It is that time of the year…that time of your life, when you set your goals right..when you know what you want to do. Just know it and do it.
Never ever do an act coz someone else is doing it. Do it coz you want to do it, even when no one else is willing to do that.

~Direct feed from Abhi’s world.
~~For more interesting posts, visit http://abhitaneja.blogspot.com

Thank you