Personal Introduction
Hi everyone! I hope you're doing well.
My name is Parinay Rana, and I secured AIR 102 in GATE DA 2026 with a GATE score of 812.
If you had told me during my GATE DA 2025 attempt that I would write a post like this a year later, I probably wouldn't have believed you. I had appeared for GATE DA 2025 with barely two months of preparation and no proper plan. I had some exposure to the syllabus, but my concepts were nowhere near solid.
This article isn't about a perfect strategy. It's simply a collection of things that worked for me, mistakes I made, and lessons I learned along the way. Take what helps you and adapt the rest to your own preparation.
Syllabus Strategy
I think one thing that can save you a lot of time during GATE DA preparation is the order in which you study the subjects. A good sequence not only makes the syllabus feel more manageable but also helps you connect concepts across subjects.
Of course, this is just the order that worked for me. Feel free to modify it according to your strengths and preferences.
Linear Algebra (3 - 4 Weeks Approx. Time)
I started with Linear Algebra because it felt like getting the best of both worlds. It has a decent weightage in GATE DA and also forms the foundation of Machine Learning. Even during higher studies later, having strong fundamentals in Linear Algebra will definitely benefit you.
Probability and Statistics (3 - 4 Weeks Approx. Time)
I moved on to Probability and Statistics next because it is another core subject for Machine Learning and AI. It also carries good weightage in exam. In fact, the 2026 paper had some very good questions from this area, so I would recommend giving it proper attention.
Python Programming (1 - 2 Weeks Approx. Time)
This was more of a personal choice. After spending a lot of time studying mathematics-heavy subjects, I didn't want to get too comfortable with only theory. Learning Python helped keep things interesting and eased my transition into the computer science side of the syllabus.
Data Structures and Algorithms (4 - 5 Weeks Approx. Time)
After Python, I studied DSA. Since you're already in a problem-solving mindset from programming, understanding concepts like arrays, recursion, trees, graphs, and algorithms becomes a bit easier.
Artificial Intelligence (2 - 3 Weeks Approx. Time)
By this point, you've already covered some of the prerequisites needed for AI. Topics like BFS, DFS from DSA and conditional probability from Probability come up again in areas such as search algorithms and Bayesian Networks. Because of this overlap, AI becomes easier to grasp and you can move through it faster.
Machine Learning (3 - 5 Weeks Approx. Time)
Machine Learning is one of the lengthier subjects in the syllabus and introduces many new concepts. Don't rush through it. Give yourself enough time to understand the intuition behind the algorithms. Try relating different topics to each other and think about why they work instead of just memorizing them. I found that this approach made learning much more effective.
Calculus and Optimization (1 - 2 Weeks Approx. Time)
For many students coming from a PCM background, Calculus may already feel familiar. Because of that, I found it relatively quicker to cover. Most of my preparation for this subject came through solving questions rather than spending a lot of time on theory.
DBMS and Data Warehousing (2 - 3 Weeks Approx. Time)
This subject feels quite different from the rest of the syllabus. I personally didn't give it as much time as some of the other subjects, but I realized that if your basics are clear and you've practiced a decent number of questions, you can score well here. Also, considering the importance it had in the GATE DA 2026 paper, I would recommend not neglecting it.
This sequence and timeline worked well for me, but it's by no means the only way to prepare.
An Alternative Strategy
The sequence above worked well for me, but there is another approach that many people may prefer.
You could study:
Linear Algebra → Probability & Statistics → Machine Learning
in one stretch.
This allows you to complete a major chunk of the mathematics-heavy syllabus together while the concepts remain fresh.
However, if you choose this route, make sure to keep revisiting the mathematical subjects while studying the CS portions of the syllabus. Otherwise, it is easy to become rusty over time.
There is no universally "correct" order.
The best strategy is the one that helps you remain consistent and understand concepts deeply.
Preparation Method
If you're preparing through video lectures, I would suggest watching them at a speed that feels comfortable to you. I usually watched lectures at 1.5x or 2x speed, depending on how familiar I was with the topic. Sometimes, if a concept was completely new or difficult, I would slow it down to normal speed or even revisit the lecture again. That's completely okay. Don't force yourself to stick to a particular speed just because others do it.
After finishing a topic, try solving a few basic questions before moving on. For example, if I had completed the Vector Spaces portion of Linear Algebra through lectures, I would attempt some questions from that topic. These could be from a question bank or a test series. I personally used the TAAi test series and kept attempting topic-wise tests alongside my lectures.
Now, you might notice that I haven't mentioned making notes yet. That's because I didn't make notes immediately after watching lectures.
Once you solve a few questions, you get a much clearer picture of how well you've actually understood the topic. Concepts that seemed straightforward while watching the lectures may suddenly become confusing when you try to apply them. You begin to identify the areas where your understanding is weak or where you tend to make mistakes.
Only after this I prepared my notes, usually using the lecture slides, PPTs as a reference.
This approach helped me a lot. If I had made notes immediately after watching lectures, I would have probably written down everything with equal importance. Practicing first allowed me to customize my notes according to my own weaknesses and understanding. That's why, in my opinion, solving a few questions before making notes is a really good practice.
Another thing I would suggest is to try completing the syllabus as early as you reasonably can. Life rarely goes exactly according to plan. There can be holidays, personal emergencies, sickness, work commitments, or phases where you simply don't feel productive. I myself had gaps during my preparation where I didn't study for almost an entire month.
Keeping these uncertainties in mind, make a realistic timeline rather than an ideal one. I was able to complete my syllabus by the first week of December, but I had already been practicing questions alongside my preparation much before that.
Notes / Study Material
I'm sure you can find plenty of study material, PDFs, Telegram resources, and lecture playlists online. There is definitely no shortage of resources these days. Still, I wanted to share some of the material that I personally used and found helpful during my preparation.
First of all, if you're preparing through books or online lectures, I would again recommend the method I mentioned earlier:
Basic practice → Understand your current level of understanding → Then make notes
I found this approach extremely helpful because it makes sure you don't miss out on important information while also keeping your notes relevant to your own needs.
While making notes, keep one thing in mind: make them in a way that even a third person could understand them. They don't have to be extremely detailed, but they should be concise, correct, and explanatory enough that you can revisit them months later without having to reopen the lectures.
Trust me, while watching lectures you will often feel like certain concepts are too obvious to write down. You'll think, "There's no way I'll forget this." But after a few months of revision, you'll be surprised at how many of those "obvious" things completely disappear from your memory.
That's where good notes save a lot of time. Instead of revisiting an entire lecture, you can quickly refresh the concept from your notes.
Also, don't hesitate to make your notes visually appealing. Use black pens, blue pens, red pens, highlighters, boxes, arrows—whatever helps you understand and revise more efficiently later. Your notes are for you, so make them in a way that works best for you.
I am sharing the drive link to my handwritten notes here, where I have uploaded both my complete notes and the short notes I prepared towards the end of my preparation. Feel free to use them as a reference, but I would still strongly recommend making your own notes because they reflect your own understanding and weaknesses.
My Handwritten Notes and Short Notes : [Drive Link]
Linear Algebra
For Linear Algebra, you can use the
TAAi marathon videos
GO Classes YouTube lectures
I personally wouldn't recommend directly referring to Professor Gilbert Strang's MIT OCW lectures for GATE preparation. The reason isn't that they're bad—in fact, they're excellent—but some topics are approached differently from a GATE perspective. However, I would strongly recommend watching them after GATE, especially if you're preparing for interviews or planning to pursue higher studies. They are fantastic for building intuition.
Machine Learning
TAAi's Machine Learning Marathon series on YouTube was very helpful for me.
Manoj Sir explains the topics clearly and concisely while also discussing good-quality problems. I genuinely felt that a large portion of the concepts taught in the full course were covered in these marathons as well, just in a much more compact format.
DSA
For DSA, I used some GO Classes Marathon videos on YouTube to strengthen my understanding of topics such as DFS, BFS, Dijkstra's Algorithm, and Graphs.
I really liked the way Sachin Mittal Sir taught these concepts. Sometimes, we end up memorizing facts without understanding the intuition behind them. His explanations helped me appreciate what actually lies underneath them.
DBMS
For DBMS, I honestly didn't use anything apart from Deepak Poonia Sir's DBMS series on YouTube.
The videos are quite long, and due to time constraints I could only watch around three or four lectures. However, the annotated notes linked in the comments of those videos are an absolute goldmine.
If you're short on time, going through those notes carefully and making your own notes alongside them can be more than enough for the subject. They are extremely well prepared.
Logic
For Propositional Logic and First-Order Logic, I found the free Discrete Mathematics resources from GO Classes very useful.
Their annotated notes, in particular, can save you a substantial amount of time and make these topics much easier to revise later.
Practice and PYQs
One thing I used to do throughout my preparation was write down almost every good question discussed during lectures in my notes. Whenever I revisited a topic, I would try solving those questions again without looking at the solutions. It was a great way to check whether I had actually understood the concepts or had just convinced myself that I did while watching the lectures.
If you have access to a question bank or topic-wise tests, practice them alongside your lectures as you complete each topic. Please don't leave all the practice for after you've completed the entire syllabus. I genuinely think that would be a huge mistake.
Personally, I solved PYQs alongside my preparation, and I feel they are one of the most important resources for GATE. PYQs give you an idea of how concepts are tested, what kind of patterns appear repeatedly, common traps, and how the examiners frame questions. Sometimes, you even end up learning a completely new concept or a different way of approaching a problem through them.
My suggestion would be to solve the relevant PYQs as you finish each topic instead of saving them all for the end. Then, during revision, go through them again. That second iteration of PYQs really helps strengthen your understanding and makes your concepts much more solid.
You might be surprised by how differently you look at the same PYQ the second time around. Questions that once felt difficult start feeling intuitive, and that's usually a good sign that your preparation is moving in the right direction.
Revision and Short Notes
No matter how many subjects you have covered or how well you understood them while studying for the first time, revision is what ultimately determines your performance in the exam. You may have understood a concept perfectly a few months ago, but if you can't recall it and apply it to solve a question during those three hours of the exam, that understanding doesn't help much.
The revision strategy that worked for me had different phases.
Phase 1: Revision from Complete Notes
In this phase, I would revise the subject thoroughly using my complete notes. I would go through the concepts properly, redo the examples I had written down, and make sure I understood everything again. Don't rush this phase. Give it the time it needs. For some subjects, a few days may be enough, while others may take a week or more.
Phase 2: Making Short Notes
Once I had revised the complete notes, I would go through them again and prepare short notes.
Try to make these short notes as efficient as possible. They should contain formulas, important concepts, common mistakes, tricky observations, or anything that you personally tend to forget. Depending on the subject, this phase may take a similar amount of time as the first phase or sometimes even less.
Ideally, try to complete these two phases within a month, but adjust according to your own timeline.
One mistake I made was waiting to finish the entire syllabus before starting revision. Looking back, I wouldn't recommend that. Try to do regular, light revisions alongside your preparation. It prevents revision from becoming overwhelming later when time pressure starts building up.
Phase 3: Revision Through Short Notes and Mocks
Once your short notes are ready, start giving topic tests and mock tests regularly.
Revise primarily through your short notes. Over time, you'll realize that the amount of time required to revise a subject starts reducing gradually. Topics that once took several days to revise may eventually take just a few hours.
As you continue giving mocks, you'll naturally identify weak areas. Maybe you've forgotten a formula, maybe a concept isn't clear anymore, or maybe you keep making similar mistakes. In those cases, first refer to your short notes. If the issue still isn't resolved, go back to your complete notes for that specific topic.
After a few cycles of mocks and revision using short notes, I would suggest doing one final revision from your complete notes. For me, a comfortable timeline for this was around mid-January onwards, but you can adjust this according to your preparation schedule.
About Short Notes
I have uploaded my own short notes in the drive link mentioned earlier, and you're welcome to use them for reference. However, I would strongly recommend preparing your own short notes.
Short notes are probably the fastest revision tool you'll have, which means they need to be tailored to your needs. By the time you're making them, you've already revised the subject once. You know which concepts you tend to forget, which formulas confuse you, and which areas need extra emphasis.
Think of short notes like that one scene from your favourite movie that reminds you of the entire story.
Your short notes should do exactly that.
They shouldn't contain everything.
They should contain just enough to trigger your memory.
Test Series
Choosing a good test series is important, but I think people often focus too much on which test series to buy and too little on how to use it. I'll share my experience here, and maybe others who used different test series can share what worked for them as well.
One thing I realized during preparation is that the purpose of a test series is often misunderstood.
It's not about how many tests you give. What really matters is what you take away from those tests.
The first part of your improvement happens through preparation. But once you've studied the concepts, how do you improve further?
The answer lies in analysis.
The better your analysis, the better insights you'll get about your preparation and the easier it becomes to improve.
TAAi Test Series
I attempted these tests alongside my preparation.
As I completed topics through lectures, I would solve the corresponding topic tests. I found that these tests often checked the depth of my conceptual understanding.
Many times, they exposed weaknesses that I didn't even know existed.
There were topics where I thought I understood everything perfectly, only to realize during the tests that my understanding was superficial.
That discomfort was actually very useful.
GO Classes Test Series
During my revision phase, I gradually started attempting the GO Classes topic-wise tests.
I found these particularly helpful because they highlighted areas where:
Many times, I learned entirely new approaches to solving familiar problems.
You can also reattempt some tests during your revision phase to evaluate how much you've improved and identify what still needs work.
Time Management and the "Multipath" Method
Time management becomes extremely important once you start giving full-length mocks.
Initially, I was doing reasonably well, but after some time my time management became completely off. I would spend too much time on certain questions and then panic towards the end of the exam.
Manoj Sir shared a method on YouTube, and I think it's a strategy many aspirants use. It's generally called the multi-pass method, but I jokingly started calling it the multipath method because everyone adapts it differently. I personally used two passes, while some people prefer three.
The idea is simple.
First Pass: Read the question and make a quick decision. If it looks straightforward, formula-based, or something you can solve within a minute or so, solve it immediately and move on.
If you think, "I can solve this, but it'll take some time," mark it for review and continue.
If you don't understand the question or feel that you currently don't know how to approach it, skip it. It will remain marked separately.
Second Pass: Come back to the questions you marked for review and solve those.
Third Pass (if time permits): Attempt the questions you had initially skipped.
This strategy worked really well for me. My time management improved significantly, and the best part was that it felt like following an algorithm. I didn't constantly worry about how many questions I had attempted or how many I had left. You trust the system and focus only on the question in front of you.
It also reduced my tendency to get stuck on one difficult, time-consuming question just because it appeared early in the paper.
At the end of the day, a test series is not just a tool to measure your preparation—it's a tool to improve it. Give tests seriously, but take the analysis even more seriously. That's where most of the learning actually happens.
Analysis and Logging
As I mentioned earlier, I believe analysis is the most important part of any test series. Giving tests without properly analysing them is like collecting data and never using it.
Over time, I developed a simple system for myself, and I'll share it here. Feel free to modify it according to what works best for you.
After you've given a few tests, you'll start noticing that your mistakes usually fall into certain categories. I classified mine into the following types:
Silly Mistake
Calculation Mistake
Read the Question Incorrectly
Insufficient Revision
New Concept
Unable to Think / Approach
I created an Excel sheet and, after every test, I would analyse each mistake and log it under one of these categories.
At first, it felt like extra work. But after a while, it became incredibly useful.
You start noticing patterns.
Maybe most of your mistakes are due to insufficient revision. Maybe you're losing marks because you're reading questions too quickly. Maybe you're making avoidable calculation errors under pressure.
Once you know the pattern, you know what needs fixing.
I've attached my Google Sheet template as well. You can duplicate it and modify it according to your own needs if you find the system helpful.
Another thing that helped me was maintaining a separate notebook for incorrect questions. Whenever I made a mistake in a good question, I would write down both the question and its solution.
If maintaining a spreadsheet feels too tedious, you can do the entire analysis in this notebook itself. Along with the solution, simply write down the reason behind the mistake:
Was it a silly mistake?
Did you forget the concept?
Was it a calculation error?
Did you not know how to approach the question?
By the end of your preparation, this notebook becomes much more than just an error log. It turns into a collection of high-quality questions, common mistakes, and important lessons that are specific to your preparation.
And honestly, revisiting this notebook before the exam can be far more valuable than solving a completely new set of random questions, because these are the exact mistakes that you have a tendency to make.
The goal of analysis isn't to remind yourself that you got questions wrong. It's to make sure you don't repeat the same mistakes again.
Mindset and Final Advice
If there's one thing I'd want you to take away from this entire article, it's this: “consistency matters more than chasing unrealistic study hours”
Some days you'll study for ten hours. Some days you'll barely manage one or two. That's okay.
GATE preparation is a long journey. Be kind to yourself. Don't compare your schedule with someone else's. Don't blindly copy a topper's routine. Build a system that fits your life and stick with it.
I wasn't a perfect aspirant. I took breaks, made mistakes, and changed strategies midway. But I kept showing up.
If my journey from an unstructured GATE DA 2025 attempt to AIR 102 in GATE DA 2026 can reassure even one person that improvement is possible, then writing this post was worth it.
All the very best. I hope some part of this article helps you in your own journey.
And if you have any doubts or just want to say hi, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
PS: If you're preparing through self-study, you're welcome to use my notes as a reference. I tried to make them comprehensive enough to cover the important concepts required for GATE DA, and I believe they can also be useful later during interview preparation.
