The one area that seems vast and undefined for your B-School/IIM Personal Interview prep is awareness. During the first phase of your CAT preparation journey, you know the topics you will be tested upon and hence, the defined syllabus allows you to prepare accordingly.
But this changes completely when it comes to the second stage of your journey. The B-School/ IIM Personal Interview stage – you can’t find a list of universal topics to prepare for; there are no text books with answers and solutions at the end. And dealing with uncertainty of such nature is not something exactly ingrained in us from childhood. It’s quite the opposite, actually.
So, when you think about your Personal interview prep, you worry that they could ask you anything. From the courses you took in college, to the history or geography of a place, to business and economics, policy and population.
While that’s technically true, practically 90% of the awareness that’s really mandatory for you revolves around a single source – YOU!
Most of what YOU need to learn about things other than yourself also comes from something about YOU.
So, for getting the external awareness right also, you need to focus inwards. Focus on YOUR story, YOUR favorite subject in college, YOUR city, YOUR hobbies, YOUR goals, YOURÂ strengths and weaknesses.
Things that will make for pleasant and coherent conversations about YOU.
Once you start answering the personal questions (and building your story), you will start identifying the trigger points for awareness areas and questions.
Get these right and chances are you’ll be fine.
Discover YOUR self, uncover YOUR self and all that stems and branches out from there.
It’s all about all about (the repetition is not an error) YOU!
About the author: Deekshant has sleep-walked through several 100 and 99.9 %iles in practically every section of the CAT. That he is a cricket fan and he writes okay is evident from most of his posts. 1000s of our students swear that he can motivate almost anyone to double his/her percentile through very simple yet powerful inputs. And that’s why every MBAGuru student has direct access to him via mail and Telegram. Oddly, he somehow also finds the time to write songs professionally. And yes … almost missed this … he is an alumnus of IIT Delhi & IIM CalÂ