Barely a few days after I landed into a B-school in Delhi NCR to pursue my dream of doing MBA, all who never got time to enquire about me began digging all about me. Should I care or focus on what I plan to do in future without being in top B-school like IIM?

Curious Relatives: What are you studying?
Me: MBA
The same one: Ohh you too! From where?
Me: ###### college in Delhi NCR. (College name not displayed)

Past CAT 100 percentilers and toppers Pranjal Agarwal, Neha Manglick, Pranjul Gupta, Vishesh Patni among others preferred self-preparation and advise the same strategy for CAT 2016 aspirants. They are unanimous that the help of coaching should be need based to take you out of the sticky areas. A generalised coaching may not be of much help to the required standard.

Achieving yet another year of successful placement, FORE School of Management Delhi has recorded higher salary and PPOs in placement season for its 2014-16 PGDM Program, which had 213 eligible students. Final Placements 2016 were both faster and better says Prof. Rajneesh Chauhan, the Chairman Placements. Better was manifested in a higher median CTC, better quality of Companies and multiple job offers for students. The highest domestic offer this year was a Pre Placement Offer with a potential CTC of Rs 21 Lacs.

Out of 6 new IIMs that started maiden PGP batch in 2015 only 3 participated in the WAT & PI round of Common Admission Process (CAP) 2016 coordinated by IIM Kashipur for 9 IIMs from February 15 to March 4, 2016. The other 3 IIMs are expected to finalize their admission offers without convening the personal interviews and Written Ability tests and might even further reduce the qualifying overall and sectional CAT 2015 percentile scores for PGP 2016-18 batch as has been done by many other older IIMs.

One of the 3 toppers in MAH CET Karan Kokane is 99.993 percentiler and is a JBIMS student for MMS 2015-17 batch. Karan not only cracked MAH CET with high percentile but also scored as high as 96.42 percentile in CAT; 98.25 percentile in XAT and 98.763 percentile in NMAT.

More than 3500 candidates participated in Common Admission Process (CAP) 2016 for admission to PGP 2016-18 batch in 9 IIMs during February 15 to March 4, 2016 in 5 different cities. The CAP 2016 round is now over and the final admission offers from all these 9 IIMs will be sent to the selected candidates shortly on the basis of their performance in WAT and PI rounds.

While an MBA program is all about classroom learning and studying in the library, the overall campus-ambience and facilities make a big difference in grooming future business leaders. After all, for a CEO, managing a business is not just about regular strategy discussions in office, but a lot about networking and social meetings, where grooming plays a big role. Also, peer-learning, where institutional environment and culture plays a big role, is one the biggest takeaways of any top MBA program.

High scorer in MAH CET with 99.98 percentile, Ajit Singh, an electronics and telecommunications engineer from KC College of Engineering, Thane has worked with IBM India Pvt. Ltd. for 10 months before appearing in MAH CET for MBA/MMS admission and getting into JBIMS. Ajit has been following the Mantra Aim big and strive hard to achieve it and kept his goal clear to pursue MBA after Engineering from one of the top ranked B-schools in India.

Witnessing the participation from industry experts, professors, acamedicians and organisational heavyweights over 2 days, Management Development Institute (MDI), Gurgaon recently concluded the conference centred on the theme of strategy to make its management students industry ready. The format of the conference was as innovative as its content.

IIMs have the history of placing controversial and most debatable topics on burning issues in the Written Ability Test (WAT) year after year to assess how coherently you pen down your string of thoughts on the topic avoiding general approach and hit the core theme. The same is happening in WAT 2016 going on in almost all the IIMs and is proposed to be over in the month of March 2016. Not much time is therefore left to groom your writing style and content on controversial topics for WAT 2016.