The GATE Story - 1
Now that the whole circus of PG admissions is behind me, I can finally sit back and write a detailed account of my GATE story. The whole thing starts with last year, when, due to shockingly poor time management, I got a dismal 800-something rank in GATE and was staring at one full wasted year. Add to that, I made some stupid mistakes in application forms (like applying for TA instead of RA at IITB) and chose to not apply for research programs at any place other than IISc. As it turned out, I did indeed get a call for test/interview at SERC, IISc. I got through the written test, but the interview was such a disaster that I must not have looked any more intelligent than your average potted plant. I came out of the interview hall feeling like the Mayor of Loserville, painfully aware that my only hope for PG in 2009 was an utter flop.
A couple of months later, I finally decided to wash away my tears of sadness with the sweat of hard work (ha!) and earnestly began preparation for GATE-2010, reading as many as two pages per day. But as luck would have it, I was extremely busy at work during the prime months for GATE preparation (November to January), working till late at nights in the office and during weekends. And just like that, I was at the beginning of February, with my head feeling unpleasantly empty and almost all of my engineering syllabus to be studied, cursing myself that I did not take up further studies seriously in my final year.
Before we go into February, let me produce a fictitious conversation at a fictitious meeting among GATE committee members, a few days before the brochure was printed:
M1: So, guys, what can we do to torture students this year? Any ideas?
M2: I know! Let's change the format of the paper! AGAIN!
M3: Excellent! And let's add a General Aptitude section!
M4: Let's remove the concept of percentiles and make all of them feel like losers when the results come out!
M5: Great ideas gentlemen! We can do all of that. But I have the best idea of them all! Let's have GATE on Valentine's Day!
M1, M2, M3, M4: (applause)
Yes, GATE was scheduled on Valentine's Day this time. So on a day when all the "committed" guys were planning on going out on dates with their girlfriends and when all the single guys were planning to call their best looking female friends out for lunch in the hope that the Rama Sene guys would catch them and marry them off, I was to be found woken up at 5 AM, groggy with barely two hours of sleep, yelling insane things like "B-Trees! I forgot to read B-Trees! Ayyo!"
Once in the exam hall, I was relieved to see that the question paper was not heart-shaped and that the room was not decorated with pink balloons (I had secretly decided to jump off the building if it were so). I found the paper itself quite manageable and took care to skip questions that I thought would take a lot of time. Indeed, when the exam finished I thought I had done reasonably well and even remember singing aloud on the way home, causing my fellow motorists to look at me with suspicion and alarm. I even resisted throwing garbage at passing couples.
I got a rude shock later that evening when I realized I had answered one of the questions inadvertently considering counting semaphores instead of binary semaphores (this stupidity would eventually cost me around 35 ranks). But the rest of the paper was mostly correct and I estimated a worst case marks of at least 51/100 which meant this year wasn't a complete fiasco after all.
Happily, a month later, when the results came, I found that I had gotten AIR 185, scoring 57.67/100 with a GATE score of 841/1000, which was the best I could hope for given the circumstances. I quickly calculated that I would get one or two direct admits and test/interview calls at practically all places I apply.
I quickly applied for course programs at IISc (CSA, SSA, SERC, CEDT), IITB, IITK, IITM and IITD. I even applied for a few electrical department courses wherever applicable. Quite expectedly, I got a call for written test/interview for MTech in Computational Science and Electronics Design and Technology at IISc. Both the tests were on the same day, so I quickly took a call to skip the CEDT test (I figured I wouldn't join it even if I got through, so why bother?). Given that I had performed so poorly in the SERC interview last year, I went with furious determination to get through the Computational Science program.
I did not even get shortlisted.
Quite strangely, I was a little bit relieved that I did not get through. Maybe it was because Computational Science was not what I wanted to do and if I had gotten it, I would have probably taken the easy way out and chucked all other offers. However, this meant that I would have to travel to Kanpur and Delhi and try to get through those.
The North India trip was quite an experience, but I shall continue it in a separate post. Do come back!
(Continued in The GATE Story - 2)