HYDERABAD: Be it IITJEE, MAT, GRE or any other entrance exam, Hyderabadi students have always excelled. Setting another example is Pallavi Bhagavatula, a final-year BA mass communication student from St Francis College for Women, who scored 99.63 percentile in the Common Admission Test, the results of which were released on Wednesday.
"To be honest, I was not expecting this. I am really happy and could not ask for anything better," an elated Pallavi said on Thursday. Pallavi, who has lived all her life in Hyderabad has her sights on IIMAhmedabad. "It's any management student's dream. I am hoping I get shortlisted for IIMA."
The girl who did her schooling from St Andrews High School says she never had any concrete plans for her future and believed in going with the flow. "I wanted to pursue journalism because it interested me. Then when my parents said that I should sit for the CAT, I started off in my second year in college by taking coaching at the TIME institute in Ranigunj. My parents have always been there to help with whatever I needed. And now I am living one of my dreams," she said.
Ask about how she belled the CAT, she replies, "Smart work is always an advantage as compared to hard work. I studied for almost two to three hours after college everyday with many small breaks in between. I studied maybe an hour longer during weekends but I didn't make any major changes to my routine or college activities."
Pallavi stuck to the study material and practiced a lot of mock tests. "My strengths were verbal and logical sections but I was really bad at quantitative ability. I worked a lot on it and finally I am really pleased with my score. When I start solving my worksheet, I did not prioritise sections. I just started doing them in order," she explains.
Pallavi says, "I take inspiration from everyday incidents and people." She signs off with a message to her fellow students, "Bunk with responsibility."