GATE 2019 Preparation and Experience
Having scored AIR 56 in GATE 2019, a lot of people asked me how I prepared for GATE so this is the reason why I decided to write this post. I have explained in great detail the work I did. I have also discussed the problems I faced and how I solved these problems. Everyone will make mistakes and everyone will have some unique problems. But figuring out the solutions to these problems is part of the preparation. So don't give up and keep on working.
The two most important resources for me were GateOverflow and RavindraBabu Ravula (RVB). I am very thankful to both of them.
During my third or fourth semester, I learned about RVB through my friends while I was preparing for a test. I got to know about GATE through him (specifically through this video - "After BTech, MS or MTech or MBA or a job??"). I started thinking about the long term options I had and GATE seemed like a good option.
Growing up I never studied for getting good grades. I always studied to learn. While studying anything I just had one goal - To understand the concept clearly enough so that I could at least explain the concept to anyone. I always got good grades but I missed something, the feeling one gets while working hard. I never thought I gave anything my 100 percent. My thoughts were very nihilistic.
I thought about the 10,000-hour rule and to be a master I had to dedicate years. I knew I needed to focus, I needed to learn working hard and for that I needed to practice sitting for long hours. So in my fifth semester, I started studying for lengthy periods of time. Even if I was not studying I would sit on the chair and table in my hostel room. I watched movies sitting on the chair. No sitting on beds for me since. I used bed only for sleeping. After one year I was more comfortable sitting on the chair than anywhere else. I bought RVB's video package for GATE and started making notes. It was a slow process. I made most of my notes in my third year besides a few subjects.
My college required me to have an internship for 8th semester, otherwise, I would have to stay in the college and do a project under some professor. In 7th semester, companies came to my college. I knew I studied my subjects well and was decent coder so I didn't work on the technical skills. I continued working for GATE and was making notes even at this time. To get a job offer or an internship I worked on quantitative aptitude, group discussion and my interview skills. I was pretty confident I would get an offer and I needed the offer just so I could decide after 8th semester what I wanted to do, either to pursue GATE or to continue with the job. I knew my preparation wasn't enough to crack GATE that year i.e. GATE 2018. For me cracking GATE meant to get into IISc or IIT-B, anything other than that would be failing. I got an internship at a start-up called 'HealthKart' which is based in Gurgaon.
I continued studying for GATE before I got to Gurgaon but once I was there I didn't have time to study. I hadn't attempted any mock test till then nor did I solve any previous year GATE question but I still attempted GATE 2018 and got a rank of around 6,000. I knew I could do better. I started thinking about what I should do going forward. I thought about what I would like my career to be and what options can I pursue. Thinking about these things proved very productive for me. As I would take a year to prepare for GATE, I knew I would get bored at some point of time and I would need something to continue pushing forward. Any GATE aspirant or any student who is preparing for an exam should have a very clear goal.
I was doing great at my internship and I was sure to get a job offer. But 2 or 3 years down the line, I knew I would need some higher qualification. I decided I wanted to crack GATE. But cracking GATE wasn't my only objective, I wanted to learn how to focus and I wanted to do it for a year. Failing at GATE wouldn't be a problem if only I could learn how to focus.
I left the internship around 20th June 2018 and headed to my home in Ujjain (Madhya Pradesh). I completed notes for some subjects - Database Management System, Digital Logic and Design, Computer Network, Computer Organization and Architecture. This took me around two months.
After that, I started practicing previous year questions. Before starting with the previous year questions I would study a subject once from my notes, this took me 2-3 days. My notes were very detailed. Then I started solving the questions. Starting out, this was very tough for me. I never prepared seriously for JEE so I had no experience preparing for a competitive exam.
After I read the subject, I would think how difficult would it be to solve these questions. I would be able to solve 50% of the questions correctly. For the remaining questions either I wouldn't understand a question or I would do some silly mistake or I would forget the information needed to solve the question. Another unusual thing happened, starting out I thought that in one sitting I should easily be able to solve 150 questions. But in reality, I could do only 30 questions in the whole day.
When I was not able to solve questions that was failure for me and I didn't know how to deal with failure. With each question I failed to solve was a slap on my face. I was close to giving up.
Then something nice happened. I was solving questions from a book which was compiled by MadeEasy. In this book, the questions were first sorted according to the subject and then according to the topic. For each question, the answer was given along with an explanation. Sometimes I wouldn't understand the explanation or sometimes I wouldn't agree with the given answer. I would search the question on Google and would check various answers. This is the time I discovered GateOverflow. I would see a great community where people would solve the question using multiple approaches. If I had some doubt with the given answer, I saw the comments on that answer and I would find someone who had the same doubt, I would read other users' response and this would clear my doubts. If my doubt wasn't already asked, I would raise a question and eventually someone would resolve my query.
A lot of answers in this MadeEasy books were incorrect. I thought who are the guys who answered these questions. They are definitely the teachers at MadeEasy. They have taught these subjects for years but still they made so many mistakes, so it is very trivial that I too will make mistakes. I knew if I was going to continue solving these questions I will meet failure daily and it is good to make mistakes because if I made mistakes now I won't make these mistakes in exam. From then on, each day I would wake up ready to fail and at the end of each day I tire myself wrestling with failure. Now failure was a very good friend of mine. Once I was ready to accept failure, the number of questions I solved increased over time. (By the way, if someone from MadeEasy wants to correct the wrong solutions, then I have marked all the questions with incorrect answers in their collection of previous year questions.)
I developed the following system to solve questions and clear my concepts. I would solve the questions on one topic, then I would mark them right or wrong according to the given answers. Then I would read the questions I solved once again, if I had some doubt in the question or if my answer was incorrect, I would search the question on 'GATE Overflow' (or 'GeeksForGeeks' in some cases) and would clear my doubts. This went on till the beginning of November 2018.
I read somewhere that to get AIR-1 in GATE one should solve previous year questions two times at least, but I didn't have time for that so I tried to absorb the concepts completely the first time.
While solving questions during this time I also used to revise subjects. Whenever I got bored with solving the questions in one subject, I would start revising some other subject. I did this so as not to waste time. When we are bored with something, we take longer to perform that task. Then later after I finished the other subject's or topic's revision, I would get back to the previous subject. I revised according to the strategy given by RVB ("How to revise and remember the topics for long!!"). After I finished solving previous year questions I would still need a day to revise the whole subject, earlier I thought this time would reduce to 2-3 hours but it didn't. This would be a problem according to my plan. I had planned that in January when I will be taking full-length test I would revise one or two subjects each day. Since I was taking a day or a day and a half to revise a subject completely, this plan won't work. Then again something nice happened.
One night I was sleepless. In the last 4 days I had completed the subject revision of Algorithms, C & Data Structures and Theory of Computation. And in these 4 days I was worried that I may not have the time to revise these subjects once again as I hadn't attempted any topic test, subject test, multi-subject test and full-length test and I had to solve them too. So I worked extra slowly trying to stuff these concepts in my mind. Remembering things isn't my strong suit and the tension that I won't be able to revise kept me from sleeping that night. I had an idea. I had tried studied these subjects very carefully this time, observing the arrangement of topics within my notes. If I could remember the name of the topic and its order, then I would able to remember the things I learned from the notes. So I did a mental revision. It took me two hours. But in these two hours while laying on my bed I revised 3 subjects completely and the types of questions asked from each topic. While doing this mental revision I identified the topics which I had learned completely and the topics where I was missing something.
I knew I was onto something. I hadn't prepared any short notes and I didn't have the time to prepare short notes. I decided to prepare short notes but in my way. For each subject, I started with a single topic. I would read the topic, if I knew everything in the topic I would just write the topic name in one line. If I knew I couldn't remember something then in-short I would write contents of this topic or just create a diagram to capture this concept completely. I did this for all my subjects and this took me one and a half months approximately.
Preparing for Mathematics was a different game altogether. I knew I didn't have grasp over all the concepts needed to solve the questions. I knew I didn't have the time to do it in the way I wanted. And I was doubtful whether I would be able to remember these concepts. Scoring in Mathematics was never difficult for me but when I prepared for Mathematics earlier it was in a very different fashion. This is the kind of problem most students face in India. I knew I had to handle this differently starting now. I wanted to pursue Machine Learning (ML) during my M.Tech and for those of you who don't know ML is a dwarf which stands on the shoulders Mathematics and modeling. I knew I had start visualizing Mathematics as I will need it in the future and I will need it to understand and solve questions faster in GATE.
I was scared what kind of questions will I get in Calculus and how will I be able to remember all the formulae in it. Then I did some research, talked to a few friends in other departments. I found out that in GATE CSE the focus wasn't much on difficult questions in Calculus. It focused more on discrete mathematics - set theory, linear algebra, probability - and somewhat on graph theory. To clear my concepts I learned some things from Khan Academy. For Mathematical Logic, Combinatorics and Probability I saw the complete playlist from PacketPrep on Youtube. For combinatorics, TrevTutor helped me. All this was in addition to RVB content.
I joined the GATExcel test series by RVB. I started giving topical tests around 13th November 2018. I had to make up for less time. I gave multiple tests a day. After topical tests and some other tests, I made short notes that I described earlier. During my preparation I didn't solve any question from GATE 2018, so after I was done preparing I took GATE 2018 full-length test. I performed terribly. That is when I realized I had to start giving full-length tests. I needed to learn managing time in the paper. Before this I was just postponing the full-length tests. So I started giving full-length tests around 20th January 2019. Apart from RVB's tests, I also gave full-length tests by mentors on GateOverflow. With each test, I could feel the improvement.
Eventually, I took GATE 2019. Even on the day of exam I made a mistake. I had problem understanding a NAT question so I left it for the end. In the last two minutes I got back to the question, understood it and did the calculation. Only one minute was remaining now. I entered the value but I thought of rechecking the answer, I rechecked the calculation and found that my answer was correct. By now the time was over and I hadn't saved the answer. I realized this only when at the end of the examination I saw 7 questions were unanswered.
RVB is an amazing teacher and his course is great. When you will solve questions you will find that some topics are not covered by him and you will have to work on it yourself. Well that is because these questions have accumulated over a long period of time and the syllabus kept on changing. Also his test series has a good level of difficulty. While taking the tests I found some questions were erroneous. Any test series you take will have some questions with incorrect answers. But RVB's team was a great help, they helped clarify my doubts or cleared their errors. I don't know if any other coaching provides this kind of support.
'GATE Overflow' was also a tremendous help. CS students are lucky that we have such a great resource. They also have great tests. I recommend buying the question bank compiled by them. It is very good. 'GeeksForGeeks' is another great resource. The articles or short notes provided by them were a great help.