Every CAT aspirant has a dream to get into one of the elite B-schools of the country. The basic criteria of selecting the candidate is based on Written Ability Test (WAT), Group Discussion (GD) and Personal Interview (PI). After giving WAT, the students gear up for the consecutive rounds of group discussions, personal interviews and in some cases the SOP's. Here are some tips that will be help you to crack GD, PI and SOP's:
Tips:
Group Discussion:
In a GD, a candidate is being tested out on primarily three things - his ability to take charge and express his views, his knowledge on the subject, the richness of the content he has to offer and finally his communication skills and body language. Make sure that you maintain eye contact with the person who is speaking and give a chance to everybody to speak. Cutting people in between, raising your voice, shrugging shoulders etc. create a negative impact. Trying to steer the discussion to a consensus fetches brownie points.
Personal Interview:
A Personal Interview normally lasts anywhere from 15- 45 minutes. In a personal interview, the interviewers try to find out if the candidate is thorough with what he has mentioned in his resume or his B-school application. Therefore, it is a must that the candidate is well aware of his background and is able to justify his application for that particular B-school convincingly. Therefore, you should be versed extremely well for answering questions about your graduation and your field of study so far, questions on your work experience if any, the reason you want to go for a management degree, what stream of management you are interested in and finally, why that particular B-school.
These are the basic questions which you must be prepared for, failing to answer which might result in rejection. It is not possible for a person to know each and everything. However, regularly following the current affairs, and reading newspapers and magazines on current happenings around the world would provide tremendous help, both during the personal interview, as well as the GD round. In case you are unaware of something that is being asked, it is advised to keep your calm and politely tell the interviewer that you do not know rather than taking wild guesses.
Statement of Purpose:
Statement of Purpose focuses to highlight why a candidate is interested in pursuing his education from a particular school and whether he is a fit to be admitted to that school. Before sitting to write down your SOP, you must frame coherent reasoning to some fundamental topics which should be addressed in your SOP.
These topics include why you want to pursue an MBA, how did you decide which school to seek admission in for the purpose of your MBA, why you should be given this opportunity over your peers and how you ensure that you would be able to handle the workload of a post graduate programme while performing to the best of your abilities. The essay that is written should be concise and crisp with instances quoted from your life where you have outperformed the expectations.
These are some of the tips which will help MBA aspirants. So brace yourself up and take the plunge because the results of your efforts will be equally fruitful. Wishing you the best of luck!