The Road less taken-by Archana Kumari (AIR 110, CSE 2020)

  Life is one and each one of us want to live it with a purpose and a sense of satisfaction.  Convincing myself of the existence of such life, I embarked on making UPSC mains strategy which I am going to share before you, the patient readers.  ESSAY As a beginner when I used to take a look at the question paper, I used to wonder how much knowledge do I need to gather in General Studies to be able to write 1200 words in an Essay. Believe me, the real hurdle is not the knowledge gap but our inhibition to start writing the first essay. During the first two years of my preparation and failing at Prelims had made me focus more on qualifying prelims, everything else was on a backseat. In order to break this inhibition, I took help of some four online lectures on Essay by Smriti Shah Ma'am of Vision IAS. I happened to write my first essay after qualifying the 2020 prelims. However, I believe the earlier you start writing Essays, the more you will get to know yourself and will h...

This post will walk you through my experience of the Prelims and what goes on in the mind of an aspirant that day. I will also talk about the major takeaways and tricks to maximize your score through examples from 2020 prelims paper.   So the much awaited Prelims had finally arrived on October 4, 2020 after getting postponed due to the first wave of COVID in our Country. Like everyone else, I too was somewhat skeptical and scared of a mass gathering at an exam center. Nonetheless, I went to take the exam after almost a month of intensive revision exercise and some 5-6 full length mock tests. I was feeling confident because of multiple revision of static sources and PT 365 Vision current affairs.  The Mindset  Recalling my risk aversive attitude in the last two prelims, this time I was mentally preparing myself for a relatively more risk taking experience. By this I mean attempting more number of questions using educated guessing, smartly eliminating options, general ...

This post is all about how I cleared the first stage of CSE in my third try at it. I call it the 'mighty prelims' because for many aspirants, prelims poses the biggest hurdle and bars one from sitting in Mains. It is getting increasingly competitive and dynamic. However, the very objective of writing this post is to share my experience of prelims preparation and tell you that you can declutter some of the challenges you have been facing in the preparation to ensure you clear this stage. To start with, I spent days reading topper blogs, watching YouTube videos and glancing through the syllabus, past year papers of prelims. I got an idea of what I was getting into. Here I had to decide whether to join a coaching right away or not. I did not join a coaching at this point because I felt that I should at least read the basic books so that even if I do take help later on, it is useful to me and I am able to get the best of what is being taught. Hence, I started self study with rea...