After getting unbelieveable 97.46%ile in CAT2007, I got a call from IMT for their PGDBM programs at Ghaziabad and Nagpur campus.
I got a call letter from them that I had to reach The Institution of Engineers(India) at Mahalaxmi on 14th February, 2008 at 8:30 a.m. for my Group Discussion and Personal Interview.
Reaching there at 8:15 a.m., I was feeling a bit scared seeing people all dressed up and readying for the occassion with truckloads of certificates and I had none, not even my marksheets . After gathering in the hall I met 2 of my BBI classmates. One was univeristy topper for BBI, Monalisa, who scored less than me ie.e 91.5%ile and the other was a guy who got thrown out of the class for low marks and creating nuisance, Tushar Kant, who got 98.1%ile and was unusually serious and he was nicely loaded with a work experience and sports certis. You never know what can hit you.
After a while we were handed over a form to fill for choice of program at Ghaziabad and Nagpur campus. In all there were 9 of them. I preferred to elect for Full Time, HR and IT at Ghaziabad as my first 3 choices followed by Finance and full time at Nagpur.
Following that we had to go to a separate room for Group Discussion. In all there were 15 of us guys in that GD. We were given 2 topics to select
1) Do Management Institutes only generate employees or do they create enterprenuers, too.
2) Should MBA's replace IAS officers?
We decided to go with topic 1 as the group felt it to be more relevant to our future and it's best to leave each to separate professional.
I got a decent chance to speak as the crowd was relatively well behaved and IMO got in a couple points only but they were pretty good. Overall the GD was nothing great but it wasn't any bad.
Considering I was the only non-engineer in my GD group makes me wonder again why is it that engineers always fare so well in CAT?
After that we again got together and discussed for a while about GD. My BBI classmates were both in group 4 opposed to my group 3. They had a nice topic, newpaper and television. Ah! The all mighty 4th estate .
After that we had a PI session. I was the second person from group 3. The same people who conducted our GD also conducted my PI. Here's a gist of how it went
INT:- So, tell us something about yourself.
ME:- I mention a bit about my educational background, current job profile, my favourite subject and my hobbies.
INT:- What bike do you own?
ME:- Pulsar DTSi UG2 150CC
(Next they changed the track)
INT:- Why did you change your feild from Banking and Insurance to IT?
ME:- explained about getting my first computer in the 2nd year of BBI, getting interested in the working of PC, fascination with Open Source, why Open Source makes business sense to me.
INT:- What kind of work do you do currently?
ME:- gave briefing about my job
INT:- You take risks?
ME:- Yes, but not too much. I prefer informed risks than blind bets.
INT:- What about you, would you like to change when you go to a B-School
ME:- getting overexcited too soon (discussed a bit on this)
INT:- What would you like not to change
ME:- My stubbornness and use of both mind and heart before making a decision (a bit of discussion on this)
INT:- Who is your favourite businessman
ME:- I consider Dhirubhai Ambani as the topmost(damn I never remembered about Larry Page and Sergie Brin or Rupert Murdock in there. I guess that's how it all goes)
INT:- Now, if Dhirubhai was alive and offered you a piece of land in Himachal Pradesh and asked you to take up a project there, would you take it up?
ME:- Depends on the terms and conditions. Also, I wouldn't if I was his employee.
INT:- OK, so he'd make you a partner if you are able to create a flourishing business. Then?
ME:- I'd ask for time to go to HP and survey before giving a final reply.
INT:- Sometimes you don't have so much time you have to reply within 5 minutes. What would you do in that case?
Me:- I would reject as I don't want to play a blind game using someone else's money.( I could have addded, I can always go later if I feel that there might be something worth out there and if I feel that there is still an opportunity, after surveying then I'd look for sources of finance again.)

That's about it. All worth 2 hours of my day. All went quite nicely and smoothly. Much better than I'd expected.
In the end, I'd like to just add this, "Be truthful, don't worry about your weaknesses and don't try to hide behing a weil. When you're truthful you can easily go on with your PI without falling into any traps set by the interviewers."

Happy New Year to everyone.
I know it's a bit late but it's still the first week of Jan. 360 days more to go.
Life's just going great with couple of people showing lot of interest in the FOSS Lab and have made some nice friends at VJTI while working on [url=http://www-vjti-intlconf.com]International Conference on SSA[/url] and it was a great learning experience to be a part of that organising team dominated by students.
And I have installed FreeBSD on my PC in this new year. More on that on my blog at Frihost.

No this is no school homework, hey I finished school long back!
Yeah, today is the day when everything is going wrong. Let's start from the beginning of the day.
I was returning from Bangalore to Mumbai in Chalukya Express, I woke up to pain in my ankle. I got up to see that the idiots sitting on the side berth had kept all their luggage on my leg. While arguing on that I happened to check my watch, it was 6:50 am- just 5 mins to reach the destination. So, I had to leave it and start packing up.
While leaving, I got a call from my uncle that mom had an operation while I was away. That pre-occupied my mind whole way while traveling back home.
After reaching in my house and relaxing for a while, I realised that I left 7 hand bags containing KDE-IN posters and gentoo flyers in Chalukya Express. That was enough to completely spoil my mood. Then, I decided to proceed to the gym to leave these thoughts behind and relax. Thankfully had a great couple of hours in the gym. A good workout after a week's break is surely refreshing.
Returning back home, I put some eggs for boiling. In the meanwhile I started preparing for a bath, just to realise that the kaam waali bai put all my pants into a bucket of water for washing. I have no pants to wear at work today . Just great. Thus, I proceeded to spend some time on my computer to kill the time while eggs are ready. To my horror, I got a grub error 22. I booted from puppy live cd to check what error 22 is. This is what I got, from GNU GRUB Manual

22 : No such partition
This error is returned if a partition is requested in the device part of a device- or full file name which isn't on the selected disk.

I furiously started checking pmount tool for the partitions, only 1 partition containing some 240 mb free space. I started gparted then and saw that there's a 243mb ext3 partition and 37gb extended partition containing an unknown partition! WOW!!!!! I said "Fine let it be so for a few more days, will reinstall gentoo later." Just then my grandmom told me that I forgot the eggs on the stove and they're overcooked. I had to throw most of them away, as it was uneatable.
This is just within 5 hrs and still 13 hrs to go in the day. Looks like it's going to be a long day ahead. I have got some running around to do the whole day it seems.
Good thing is now if I ever again have to write an essay on "The day when everything went wrong", I will never have to make up a story.

Happy Diwali Everyone. May the festival of lights bring light into everyone's life.

I got my CAT hall ticket this week. I got my centre as thakur college Of all the colleges in Mumbai I had to get this one? Still it's better than getting NL College.
Less than a month to go for CAT now, so gotta get on with the preparations.