The Final Countdown: A Week to the CAT - Sanmeet Sidhu

Six, five, four, three…

You must be hearing the countdown everytime you close your eyes now and listen inwards. The day that you’ve been preparing for, the day that will decide the course of your future career and of so many others, is finally just around the corner. You may be one who has been preparing diligently and systematically over a long time, or you may have given it one hard and honest shot in the last few weeks – regardless of which group you belong to, a certain amount of tension would have gripped you by now. While it is healthy and in fact even beneficial to be mildly tense, it should not go out of bounds.

So how do you deal with the stress now?
How do you concentrate only on what is essential and cut the rest out?
How do you put your anguished and worried minds at rest and make the best possible use of these last few days?

Well, to set the record straight at the very outset, do not expect to master anything new at this point of time. Do not experiment. Just practice and consolidate whatever you have learnt and most importantly, do maintain your regular everyday routine. Burning the midnight oil and cutting out all regular activities may not be a good idea at this point in time. Having said that, here are a few concrete pointers as to how you can effectively utilize this last week, as revealed by interactions with coaching experts as well as MBA students and alumni:

• Go through the basic study material that you have used, just to keep a grip over all that you have learnt. If there are any specific doubts, contact your teachers and guides immediately.
• Go over the word lists or vocabulary-building exercises that you have done so far.
• Recapitulate the broad concepts relating to Grammar
• Keep reading something till the day of the examination, whether it is business literature, news or fiction. You must remain in the habit of reading.
• Be thorough with all the key mathematical formulae – even if you find a particular topic especially complicated and difficult, you may choose to ignore advanced problems on that, but do brush up on the very basic formulae and simple problems.
• You can take a test every alternate day, but preferably not any on the day before the exam. Spend more time on analysis of successive performances. In any case, what you learn from these analyses is far more important than the number of tests you take now.
• Most importantly, concentrate on the “smart selection” strategy when you take and analyse tests.

However, one thing that you all need to understand is that it is as much a test of your nerves as of your brain at this hour. Every successful test-taker will tell you how important it is to stay calm and focused at this hour. But they will also admit that it is perhaps the most difficult thing to do when the CAT is scratching at your door. So let’s look at a few practical examples of what you can do to relax your mind and also stay physically fit:

• Try not to discuss your preparedness (or lack of it) with others; most of us have a tendency to get psyched up after such discussions
• Don’t berate yourself now on account of things that you should or could have done, but haven’t
• Don’t neglect your meals; a good breakfast is something absolutely indispensable. Drink plenty of water throughout the day.
• Allow yourself the normal hours of sleep that you are used to having – staying up nights and trying to cram more word lists and formulae will not help
• If you know any meditation techniques, practice them regularly. Even if you don’t, take time out everyday when you can just sit back and breathe deeply – it helps to soothe your mind

Finally, as one of your most favourite columnists Chitra Jha puts it, “visualize success. Remember that your subconscious is inherently powerful. Feed it with pictures of success – before going to bed every night, see yourself entering the examination hall confidently, scanning the paper and finding that it is something which you can easily and optimally tackle. Visualize this scenario everyday till it is embedded deep within your mind. On the day of the examination, the Universe will play back your picture to you.”

Have faith, and do well!