After completing 2 years as a Associate Software Engineer in a startup in Gurgaon, decided to quit the job and appear for GATE and secured a rank that has increased the uncertainty of my future(AIR-1254). Now until now all the posts were of people with ranks <400 and you would be thinking why this bloke with a pathetic rank is writing a post. But I just wanted to share my experience as to how after preparing for 4 months(YES, I started preparing only in October, when the toppers had already completed the syllabus) and seeing the pattern of the paper change drastically as from previous years I was able to maintain such calm and composure so as to not completely ruin my rank. Sorry for the length of the post
So the journey started in 2015 when I first appeared for GATE. As I was already placed in the above mentioned company and had no intention of further studies(due to the mindset "Bhut kar li padhai..ab paise kamayenge bas :P") I appeared for the exam in the most chilled out manner,i.e. after watching a movie till late night and waking up just 1 hr before the exam and gave the exam just because 1000 rupaye lage the bhaiya. But as I was a study bloke in my college who used to read most of the subjects from standard books and used to teach around 20 students from before each exam, for the first time while giving a competitive exam in my life I FELT GOOD. Now on the results day I was travelling from Delhi to Jaipur and was receiving messages constantly that although they prepared for a complete year still they got rank above 5k and forced me to check my result but I was in no mood and had also forgotten my credentials :P. Once I reached home, I checked the result and it showed a rank around 3k and I was like this is the best result I have seen for myself uptil now
Fast forward 2 years(July 2017), the desire to study again and that too from some reputed college and professors(forgot to mention did my B.Tech from a tier 3 college), and the previous attempt's result I resigned from the job and started preparing for GATE from October. Now initially it was a little difficult getting back to studies and thus decided to join Gateforum's Online Coaching which made me realise that reading from standard books aorund this time won't help my cause. Thus only took help of reference books where I wasn't able to understand the concept from the online coaching. I knew that my weakest subject is CN and thus tried to cover a lot of topics from Ross, Kurose although still ended up getting least marks in CN only :(. But the confidence in other subjects like OS, DBMS, Maths helped in overcoming the CN loss. Now coming to the GO community, I introduced it to myself in December, too late I was in getting to know about such awesome community but still I learnt a lot and tried to learn as well as get involved in various discussions. With just 1 month left I got a lot of support in getting my queries solved from Higgs, Mk Utkarsh, Ashwin Kulkarni, Anu007 and many more. Since none of my friends were giving GATE along with me and I had no mentor who could guide me while my preperation GO community members helped me a lot.
I still regret making the silly mistake in that "Hi Bye Bye Hi" question which could have resulted in getting <1000 rank but I know silly mistakes happen even with the toppers :P. So this was my journey from being nothing to still being nothing and would seriously want some suggestions about whether I should apply in any of the IITs, i.e. can I get a call from any of them(old or new) and what other colleges should I prefer.
