Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Passion and Devotion

I have been hearing about Byju and his unique CAT coaching for an year now. Although I heard raving reviews about his captivating techniques from his students who were my buddies, I had never considered giving it a shot until I attended his intro-workshop. It all started with an ordinary but honest looking ad in hindu urging CAT aspirants to try out this "new kid in the block" and because it was free I decided to try it out.

Next day after I registered, I received a call from a guy who introduced himself as Byju himself. Now that was unique, we had a small chat and he told me that he is also from Kannur( I knew he was from Kannur the minute he started talking in malayalam :) ).

The Jyothy Nivas college auditorium of capacity 1000 people was half full on that sunday morning. Byju introduced himself quite confidently and told us all that he was a 100 percentiler in multiple CATs. I have always thought myself to be a supremely confident person, but the astounding confidence with which Byju went on introducing himself and his venture made me reconsider my guaging metric. Although I was impressed with his confidence alone, that was nothing compared to the high octane Quant class which was going to follow it. Byju flitted from numbers to Permutations & Combinations to Geometry to Speed, Distance and Time with unwavering ease. Each and every word in that session was a value add to a serious CAT aspirant. When it finally drew to close at 12, I suddenly realised that I have lost track of time and this session was unlike any gruelling Quant session I have ever attended and this teacher is someone with a real passion for math. In the end, Byju announced that he will start a CAT batch next week and interested people can lock their seats with a token advance. I really didn't do that, I coughed out the entire amount for I was convinced that this was the teacher I was looking for, if any one could help me get through CAT, it is this man - Byju Raveendran.

Epilogue:

CAT 2008 was my fourth attempt at CAT and I have tried TIME classroom classes in 2005 and 2007. In 2006, I tried IMS Simcats. None of them really helped me in CAT. Ofcourse the Mockcats were a good practice. So as I have already mentioned, I tried Noesis Education a.k.a Byju's CAT classes in 2008 and got calls from IIMB and IIMS. I needn't tell you what was different this year. Byju and Santhosh(VA teacher at Noesis) gave me knowledge, taught me tricks and gave me supreme confidence which culminated in a good performance at CAT.