Meet Kunal Singh IIM-I PGP 2024 share about IIM student lifestyle, Career after MBA, CAT prep tips

With a CAT Score of 98.40 %ile, Kunal shared about his experience at IIM-I, tips to crack CAT, his transition from a working professional to an MBA student and more. Check out some interesting excerpts from the interview below:

Kunal Kumar Singh, currently pursuing MBA from IIM-I, hails from Jamui, Bihar. Kunal is an engineering graduate who decided to upskill his qualifications with an MBA degree after being a Territory Service Manager at Ashok Leyland Limited. With a CAT Score of 98.40 %ile, Kunal shared about his experience at IIM-I, tips to crack CAT, his transition from a working professional to an MBA student and more.

With an aim to offer contextually relevant courses with world-class academics, the Indian Institute of Management Indore is signing MoUs with educational institutions located across the globe. The institute claims to offer an excellent academic environment to its students. Belonging to the ‘most prestigious management institute’s brand’ IIM Indore is known for its unique courses and initiatives.

To get a better understanding of ground-level realities, Shiksha.com got in touch with Singh. Check out some interesting excerpts from the interview below:

Q1: What was the key part of IIM-I’s MBA programme that led you to choose this business school and why was it so important to you?

IIM Indore, established in 1996, has a rich legacy of 26 years in the field of management education, with alums present over the entire Indian business map. The quality and methodology of teaching, the vast range of skill development courses and electives, excellent international exchange program, and the 2nd business school to be awarded the prestigious triple accreditation in India were the unique features of IIM Indore’s MBA program that led me to make it my first preference.

IIM Indore’s importance to me lies in the satisfaction I derive from being in an institute of IIM Indore’s stature. Its diverse batch from a multitude of educational and industrial backgrounds whom I can network with, its excellent infrastructure, and outstanding prospects in employment at influential business positions.

Q2: Which one habit that you followed during your CAT preparation helped you crack the management entrance exam?

If I have to speak about one habit I followed religiously while preparing for the CAT exam, it would be maintaining consistency in my studies. It might seem easy, but it has been the most challenging task to follow, as distractions are pretty natural when you have to engage in multiple activities simultaneously. For me, these distractions were the unpredictability of my field job requirements. However, besides various constraints, I used to make sure that I devote some time to my CAT preparation every day and measure it not precisely in terms of the time I studied, but the focus I put on CAT and my productivity for the day.

Q3: Describe your educational background:

I did my senior secondary education at D.A.V Public School, Jamui, passing out in 2013, where I secured a 10 CGPA. For class 12th, I shifted to Bihar board and completed my higher secondary education from S.A.E. College, Jamui, in 2015, achieving 78.80% marks. I did my graduation in Mechanical Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Durgapur, passing out with distinction in 2019 and scoring an 8.46 CGPA. 

Q4: Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far:

I will attribute one project (Root cause analysis and suggest measures for improvement of declining sales of a specific truck model) that I carried out and the enormous positive impact it created (60% increase in market share) while being in my professional role at Ashok Leyland to be my biggest accomplishment so far in my career. Why do I consider it to be my most significant achievement? The answer is the confidence to take up such a task and deliver on it; being a fresher in the profession with almost no knowledge about the field had numerous challenges. But, through the course of my work, I handled all these challenges, derived significant learnings, came out victorious on the work front, and the cherry on top was the budding of my will to pursue an MBA.

Q5: Describe your biggest accomplishment as an MBA student so far:

It’s the start of my MBA journey now, and I am trying to juggle the bundle of opportunities at hand. All I have achieved till now is narrowing down my area of interest and have started working towards meaningful goals, which I am pretty sure about attaining.

Q6: How MBA would help you to transform your skills as per industry?

Being an engineer and having worked in the automobile industry, it’s been pretty clear to me that the present industrial scenario requires an amalgamation of multiple skill sets to make it big in career. An MBA from a reputed institute like IIM Indore will provide me with a diversity of knowledge ranging from sales, marketing, finance, and Human resource management to many more, which will ultimately scale up my existing skills and enable me to explore the immense scopes of its application.

In the end, I will say, the personality development and the confidence to take on challenging and completely new projects that an MBA encompasses in an individual is the most sought-after industry requirement.

Q7: What led you to pursue an MBA at this point and what is the next milestone you want to achieve after graduation?

Throughout my professional career, I have worked on multiple problem-solving projects, some having significant impacts while others with marginally low effects. In the course of these challenging projects, I understood that problem-solving requires one to think at a broader scale, and my limited or no knowledge about various domains made my work quite tricky at times. This lack of knowledge was my trigger behind pursuing an MBA, through which I can develop a holistic understanding of different domains and apply them in the present industrial scenario.

I haven’t set any strict milestones after graduation as of now. My only focus right now is to explore all the territories of business through the diverse academic curriculum. My limited learnings so far have inclined me towards business world problem solving, which will ultimately require knowledge of almost all the business domains.

Q8: Important advise for aspirants aiming to gain admission into IIM-I ?

My advice to aspirants aiming to join IIM-I will be to focus on the preparation process, not on the results at this point of time. With three months remaining for the CAT exam, attempt mocks, analyze them and work towards your weaknesses. At the same time, set small milestones for yourself and try achieving them through mocks. If your process is robust enough, and you derive satisfaction from the little progress you have set for yourself, rest assured that you will ace CAT 2022.

Once you are through the first step, you need to be even more conscious about the interviews, don’t leave it for the sake of luck, as it is the primary differentiator behind you getting to your dream school or losing on the opportunity.

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