GATE 2015: How to start your preparations

By Ankit Goyal

The first question that every GATE aspirant has is to how to begin the preparation and what coaching classes to join and people are willing to move to a different city to associate themselves with a big institute which is flaunting big rankers, so let me first clear one myth that to get a good GATE rank, you need not join any coaching institutes.

Coaching Institutes do have their fair share of pros and cons, the pros include experts teaching you various subjects in GATE curriculum and guiding you through your journey but the cons that I have observed with some of my friends are that most of your valuable preparation time is spent in the coaching institutes and you get a very less time to spend on the self-study which itself is the most significant component of preparation for any entrance exam due to which students face a problem due to lack of practice in exam and can commit silly mistakes even in the most trivial of the problems. So the question that arises is why should anyone join any institute, so the answer to that will be that if you are a dropper than you better join a institute as you will have lost touch with most of the concepts taught during your under-graduate courses, but if you are in final year or pre-final year of your Graduation, then better hit the libraries and start referring to some text-books as the students entering their final years would have covered most of the significant subjects for the GATE exam so they can easily go through text books and recall different concepts which will save them a lot of time as preparation with college studies is itself very difficult due to pressure of a lot of exams and projects.

Even then some students will feel that concepts have not been properly explained in their colleges or their college lacks in the technical competence so I would suggest that if you want to join any institute, better join weekend classes as then you will have time in weekdays to put in a dedicated time for self-study. Also, while evaluating how different institutes are and which one is better for you, you can interact with the alumnus of those institutes to get to know better as to what subjects are taught best in that institute as no institute can give all the subjects best teaching and then you can judge for yourself.

The next question in the mind of every GATE Aspirant is which Institute’s material is the best, what should I buy?

The answer to this question is that nothing is better than your own notes but we all are searching for some short notes so that we can save the effort involved in preparing them that is we are looking for a short-cut to the GATE rank but believe me when I say that “There is no short-cut to success”. The good thing about self-made notes is that they are easier to understand and revise and believe me they help immensely during the last months of preparation and whenever you write anything down then you have a better chance of retaining it than when you just read it and that is why you’ll always lack confidence if you studied through someone else’s notes or some institute’s correspondence material as you won’t be able to remember most of the things.

The next important thing is that people will think that they cannot study all the textbooks in the limited time-frame for the GATE exam, so my opinion in this matter is that you first go through GATE curriculum and try to identify what all are your weaker areas like weak subjects or even concepts that you are not comfortable with and refer to text-books for those specific topics or if you want to start your preparation from scratch and study all the subjects from the text-books as would be the case with most of the drop-outs then clearly mark all the concepts required for GATE in the text-books so that you may not waste any time in reading any unnecessary concepts and you will realize one thing that if you have correctly identified the topics and concepts required for GATE that the GATE curriculum is not that broad that it seems from the outset and that itself provides a boost in the confidence. One thing to make sure while reading any text-book is to take notes as you cannot go through a text-book every time you want to revise anything.

So, now you have identified all the things necessary for GATE and collected the ingredients necessary for a top GATE rank, the only thing that you need now is a timeline that is designed on per-person basis, which means you need to identify for yourself, by what time which all subjects or topics should be covered and that will help you keep a track of your preparation and it will tell you whether you are on-track or off the track with your preparation and you must try to follow that timeline at all costs and at all time.

The last thing that generally students want to know is how many hours you need to devote to get a good rank in GATE exam to which there is no absolute answer as the intellectual level of different people is different and different students have different schedules due to which they cannot devote same time to their preparation, so once you have prepared a timeline you will know exactly as to how much effort you need to put in to realize your goals and you need to make sure about one thing that you devote consistent time on all days and all occasions without fail, no matter whether it may be 2 hrs or 3 hrs but that should be consistent.

So, now you are ready with everything that you need. So let’s get started.

About the author:

Ankit completed his B.Tech from IIT Indore in Electrical Engineering in 2013. He appeared for GATE-2013 during his final year and acquired an All India Rank(AIR) 8. He again took the exam in 2014 and emerged as a topper with an AIR-1. Ankit was also a gold medalist in his batch. Currently, he is working at Qualcomm India Private Limited, Bangalore.

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