Being Rational: June 2013

Aim of the post is to give pros and cons of self study over coaching institute and secondly give resources for GATE CSE prepration.

I come across a number of questions regarding which coaching institute is good for particular competitive exam. So I thought of giving another perspective for preparing for exam through i.e. self study and along the way share my personal experience during preparation of one such exam.

I was in final year of my B.Tech. when I decided to go for higher education. I decided to go for self study rather than a coaching institute because of two simple reason first you are taught by world class teachers and secondly you can save a lot of travelling time and money too. After preparation of 6-7 months I was pretty confident to perform well . In my first attempt I didn't score enough to get even a good NIT. Convincing myself that I was too aspirant and didn't deserve to be in IIT, I went for the job in TCS. I had lot of fun in TCS training, but I knew i can't survive here. I again thought of appearing for GATE. Coming from training I joined a test series to get the feel of GATE. I read my notes and watched the lecture series again in next 3-4 months. This time luckily I secured a decent rank and got admission in IIT Kanpur for M.Tech.

Now lets look pros and cons of choosing self study over a coaching institute.

Pros :

1. World class teachers : There are on line video lectures of teachers who are master in their subjects and make understanding of the concepts really easy.

2. No Boundaries : Self study helps you discover topics which are important in terms of the subject but might not important from examination perspective.

3. Save time and money : If you are like me who live 2 hours away from good coaching institute, you can save 4 hours daily which really matters when you are preparing for a tough exam. As far as money is concerned, all you need is a good internet connection compared to 30K-60K in coaching institute.

4. Learn at your own pace.

5. Not just preparation : Self study change your attitude towards acquiring knowledge. Even if you didn't get IIT or good institute you can acquire knowledge through on line sources like coursera, udacity etc and get a good placement or good P.hd. program.

Cons :

1. Discipline : Self study require a great discipline and self motivation.

2. Unstructured Preparation : This is a great problem with preparing on your on. Most of the time you don't know what to study, where to study, in what order to study? So take help of someone who has already prepared.

3. Different angle to the problems : When you are studying in a group you get a number of approaches to a particular problem which are generally missed during self study. But you can overcome this problem by joining on line groups or making your own study group which meet once in a while.

Second Part :

Being Rational

Saturday, 8 June 2013

Why self study?

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