The One Who Barely Made it to the IITs

In the summer of 2002, I had a warm feeling of accomplishment wash over me as I was entering the hallowed gates of IIT Kharagpur for the first time. I had finally made it to the IITs … barely! I had scored just enough to qualify as the last student admitted to the dual degree programme in Civil engineering in IIT Kharagpur. I still remember that my ‘hawah’ (colloquial term in IITs for AIR or All India Rank in JEE) was 2502. In those days, IITs and ISM Dhanbad combined took in only about 3,000 students every year.

My tumultuous journey to get into the IITs and my subsequent experience there puts me in a unique position to share my opinion on what it takes to crack JEE from a rarely written perspective of “just meeting the bar”.

The first thing you need to know is which subjects you excel at and which are the bane of your existence. History is witness to the fact that battles are won on your strengths. You must beat JEE on subjects of your choosing. Personally, I hated Chemistry! But I loved Mathematics and Physics. It’s easier to know what you hate but it’s more difficult to know whether you are good enough in the subjects you like to crack JEE. To know whether you are good enough, answer this for yourself: Do you like tackling twisted problems from that subject and are usually good at it? Do people reach out to you for understanding the concepts from that subject? If you can’t say ‘yes’ to one of those questions for at least two subjects of the three tested in JEE, then ask yourself if you really want to be an engineer?

The second thing that you need in abundance is perseverance. It took me two attempts to clear the IIT-JEE. During my school years, my coaching institute actually gave me a feedback saying I should prepare for other engineering institutes. But I didn’t let these failures dent my self-belief. If I had lost that, I wouldn’t have tried the second time and would never have become an IITian. I don’t intend to advocate giving JEEs again and again till you succeed. The key message is that you may get a lot of negative feedback during your preparations. Extract what is useful in terms of improving your performance and ignore the rest. No one has the right to tell you what you deserve.

Next on my list is focused work. The difference between my first attempt and the second attempt was not the number of hours I studied for the exam. The difference was in the way I studied. In my first attempt, I was scattered and tried to solve questions half-heartedly from any book that I could get my hands on. It was time consuming and frustrating. Half the time I used to give up and look at the answers from the solution key so that I could move on to the next question. Since JEE doesn’t give an answer booklet to their question paper, I obviously didn’t make it that year. You should always value understanding concepts over solving questions mindlessly from ten books that your friends said you must do. And the only way to build concepts is to spend enough time on each problem till you come up with a solution yourself. That way, even if your answer is wrong, you will have a better understanding about what you did was incorrect.

Of course there is nothing that replaces hard work. But hard work by itself is seldom a differentiator. There are a lot more people working hard than there are seats available in IITs. There are two types of hard work that you need to do. The first is to make up for the subject you don’t like in order to meet the hygiene level for passing cut offs. For example, even if I didn’t like chemistry, I spent additional time in understanding stoichiometry and remembering organic chemistry equations. I figured that should be enough to get me through. The second is to make sure you score as much as possible in the subjects you like. Here you need to solve different type of problems so that you have seen most of the common variations that are asked in JEE.

This is where I would like to say a word about coaching classes. Good coaching classes have two components. They have good teachers that are focused on teaching you concepts and preparing you mentally by boosting your confidence. If a coaching center has a good reputation and the students usually seem more calm and confident, then that’s a good sign! Secondly, good coaching classes have good study material. Good material has just enough variety of problems to familiarize you with most type of questions asked in JEE. And finally, when assessing a coaching center always look at their conversion rates and not the absolute figure of successful candidates. It’s easy to get 100 students into IITs if you are coaching 10,000 across the country.

However, looking back I realize that the biggest mistake I made in my preparation for IITs was to settle for “just enough”. I realized in my first year of IIT that those who did better than me had one thing in common. They wanted to achieve excellence more than I did. Inspired by those around me, I learnt to be more passionate and dream bigger. Yes! I learnt it. Unlike what most people will tell you, being passionate is less about serendipitously finding what you love. It’s more about your outlook and attitude towards life. You can choose to be passionate. When I finally understood this and made the choice, my grades at IIT started improving. Every semester I scored better than the previous one till I finally hit the coveted GPA of 10 on 10 and received a written commendation from the Director of IIT Kharagpur. I have never looked back since and have always chose to be intensely passionate about what I am doing.

It is passion that helps you to find what you love, to have perseverance, to focus on what matters most and then work hard to achieve what you want. Over a decade has passed since I walked through those hallowed gates. My father used to tell me that my life is made if I get through JEE. But the fact is, I actually made my life in years during and after IIT. Today, I know people who didn’t get to cross those gates with me but they are far more successful in life than many of my batch-mates. The difference is that they chose to be passionate about what they did elsewhere, and finally it didn’t matter whether they made it to IITs or not.

The author is a graduate from IIT Kharagpur and is currently working as a Venture Capitalist in healthcare sector with Matrix Partners

Related Links:

JEE (Main) 2014 Exam Date Announced

JEE (Advanced) 2014 Exam Date Announced

Tips and Tricks to crack IIT-JEE Exam without coaching