Here’s the Interview of Mouzzam Ali, who cleared the CAT exam with 97.32%ile and converts IIM Lucknow along with his job.
Q: Hello Mouzzam, great to have you here. Let’s talk about your profile first, please tell me about your academics and your work experience.
MOUZZAM: I did my bachelors in Business administration and after that I joined TCS and worked there for around 6 months but due to some family issues I resigned and started preparing for the CAT exam from last year in March and it was my first attempt for the exam.
Q: How difficult was it to prepare for the CAT exam along with your job?
MOUZZAM: For the first 3 months, it was smooth and there was no issue at all as I was working from home. So, I used to get an ample amount of time for the preparation and everything was just quite balanced at that time but after May, once I joined the on-site location in Kolkata, then things started becoming more and more difficult and there was a primary issue of time management. Then, what I used to do was that I used to get all the things assembled at one place and get all the things accessible to me in the morning time itself. I used to get up early there in Kolkata and managed everything there and tried to keep all the things at the right place at the time.
Q: So, what was your overall percentile, your sectional percentile and all the B-Schools that you have converted?
MOUZZAM: My overall percentile is 97.32 where I got 93+ percentile in all the 3 sectionals where quant was the highest with 98.6%ile. So, the percentiles were balanced in all the 3 sectionals.
The B-Schools that I have converted are IIM Lucknow and IIM Indore and all other New and baby IIMs. There are 2 programs at IIM Lucknow and IIM Indore and I was offered both of them from both the places.
Q: What made you choose management as a Career and why MBA? What was the Reason or Inspiration behind it?
MOUZZAM: The major incident happened in covid actually when I got stuck at my relatives house. I used to accompany my brother, who was a distributor at a dairy firm. I used to help him in marketing activities, negotiate with the suppliers and the buyers and give ideas for how to increase the sales or gain new sale areas. So, that experience fascinated me a lot. After my 10th also I used to get interested and dig deeper into things like sales, public speaking and all the other things as I wanted to explore as much as possible in order to know what is the field and what is the work in which I am most comfortable. So, with all these things I liked to communicate with people and know about business and sales and these were the things that motivated me to do something in management. So from there, I took BBA in marketing and now MBA.
Q: How was your preparation journey, was there any institute that you joined for the preparation and what were the facilities that were provided to you for the preparation?
MOUZZAM: For this, I would like to add something. The place from where I belong, that is Deoghar, there is not a single institute there for CAT coaching. So, I had only online options and I used to search for online institutes. From there, through quora and reviews of people, I got to know about iQuanta and the facebook public group of iQuanta. There, I saw how people were interacting and helping each other to solve their queries. I saw many other institutes also, but at last I joined iQuanta classes because it gave me the flexibility of going through the classes at any time of the day and the peer support that it was having was really a great thing to have.
Talking about the preparation, the Quant section was somewhat difficult for me because in my graduation, I had taken BBA and there I did not study mathematics at all. So, in the initial stage of my preparation it was quite difficult for me but later on, I realized that the syllabus was not that tough.
Q: How did a day in your life look like when you were preparing for CAT?
MOUZZAM: In the first 3 months of my preparation, I was working from home so it was a smooth experience for me. I used to wake up at 8 or 9 in the morning, get freshen up and do my morning exercise and then start studying from 10 in the morning. I used to start my day by reading articles and some other stuff. After that I used to take 15 minutes of break and study quants and DILR for 2-3 hours. There was an excel sheet that I had prepared for and I used to fill each column of that according to my studies and daily tasks. After that at around 12:30 pm, I used to login for my office work and do my work till evening. After that at 10pm I used to join the application classes. Most of the time, I missed the live classes, but for that thankfully iQuanta provided me with the recorded sessions. At midnight right after my application classes, I used to give 2-3 hours to Quant and VARC section and with that my day would end and I would go to sleep and repeat the same cycle every day.
Q: Was there any anxiety or stress during your preparation journey? If yes, then how did you deal with it?
MOUZZAM: My rule was very simple that if you are satisfied with your preparation then it is known that you have already dealt with a lot of things and must have a backup plan because people generally get into things like depression and all as they do not have any backup plan. So, according to me if your preparation is good and you have a good backup plan then you will not have any depression, stress or anxiety.
Q: How was your performance in the mock series?
MOUZZAM: In the beginning, the performance was terrible. In the beginning, I was getting the score of 60-70 in the iQuanta as well as other mocks and 76 was the highest score that I got at that point of time. So, I used to give around 2-3 hours to analyze the mocks and to see what’s the difference between my solutions and the actual solutions. Overall I didn’t get a good score in mocks but I used to analyze it very well and work on it. There is one thing that I believe most of the aspirants do not do in RCs is that they do not pay attention to the difference between their answer and the actual answer which can be a problem in the CAT exam. No matter if your answer looks quite the same as the actual one, you have to work on it too.
Q: Did you make any notes while analyzing the mocks to know what are your mistakes?
MOUZZAM: Yes, I used to write a lot. I used to write about the strategies that I was implementing while solving and analyzing the mocks because for every mock I was applying a different strategy and by writing it down, it was easy for me to pick the right strategy. I used to take care of the fact that how much time I am taking to solve a particular section so that I can pace up my speed to solve the questions.
Q: What according to you are the 3 most important things that a CAT aspirant should take care of?
MOUZZAM: I think the first and foremost thing a CAT aspirant should know is why he needs or wants to do an MBA because there is one thing that I observe so much and it’s that whenever an aspirant starts the preparation for CAT, After 1 or 2 months they start saying that they are giving up and it is not something that they want to do. So, you need to have a solid reason to prepare for CAT and go for MBA.
Second thing is the selection of the right institute. You have to see which institute is the ideal one for you and which suits you the most. The third and the most important thing is to know what you have to do and what you do not have to do. During the preparation people only pay attention to the fact that they have to study and score good marks but along with that they are engaged with other activities too. They are engaged or somewhere connected to other things that they like to do in their life. So, it is important to not engage with those things during their preparation journey so that they have a full concentration and commitment towards their preparation.
Watch Mouzzam’s full interview here:
Q: After the CAT exam, there are Interviews as well, So how was your interview and what were the questions that were asked by you?
MOUZZAM: I will talk about my IIM lucknow interview, because it was the best interview that I had. The interview went for about 30-35 minutes. All other interviews were of 10-15 minutes only but this was quite long because it was an interactive interview. We generally prepare for an interview where we just have to listen to the question and then answer it accordingly but this one was not like that. It was a conversation type of interview where the questions revolved around my academics. Since I had done BBA in marketing, they asked me some questions like the 4 Ps and 4 Cs, which are some famous concepts in marketing. They asked about my college and also about my father’s profession. They were interested to know more and more about myself because I was able to drive the interview according to myself. I was answering the questions in such a way that I already knew what my next question would be.
Q: Apart from the CAT exam, what were the other management exams that you gave and according to you why it is important?
MOUZZAM: Apart from the CAT exam, I just appeared for the XAT exam. I scored around 90%ile only in the XAT exam because I fell sick on the exam day and was not even comfortable to sit in the exam. But, what I think is that one should appear for 2-3 other management exams as well apart from CAT because sometimes it happens that you prepare well but due to some reason you don’t do well on the exam day. So, it is very important to prepare and appear for other exams as well so that you have more options with you.
Q: What are your thoughts on mental and physical health and what is the role of it in the preparation of the CAT exam?
MOUZZAM: I actually prefer mental health over physical health as I believe that it is more important while you are preparing for the CAT exam or any other management exam. There is not only the CAT exam that an aspirant has to prepare for but there are interviews as well. So for that, I think mental health is more important than physical health. I personally do meditation to maintain my mental health and there is one thing that I believe is also important to have and that is you need to have a good connection with any of your family members, friends or anyone else because it helps to reduce stress.
