GASICS Part 8
Right then. new batch, new start. Having shifted 3 batches in 3 weeks,you wouldve assumed that that I knew the drill by this point.
My good old friend, massive imposter syndrome was back, and twice as bad. Here I was, some strange batch hopping weirdo, asking stupid questions I should have known the answers to, sitting in a class with Olympiad child prodigies.
New teachers! Our new chemistry teacher was a woman I will probably have nightmares about for the rest of my life. She had an aura of quiet power about her.
Blunt remarks, delivered in her deep voice, hurt at first, but were valuable pointers which you saw the value, in only the long run. She was very determined to getting her students to the top, and I feared and respected her for that.
In the first class itself, she threw a knockout punch. I felt my hopes die in real time, as she told us that a further round of shuffling would be done based off of our Mains 1 score.
Only people with a percentile above 99.5 would get to stay in the batch. Having never crossed 98.2 percentile in any of the mock tests I had given so far, I could see the death of my dream approaching.
But why, wouldn't being in any other batch be good enough? No. You see, WoW was going to be the only batch that was going to prepare for Advanced, while the rest focused on JEE Mains 2.
Staying here was critical, those 4 extra months were needed to have a chance of tackling the beast of an exam JEE Advanced is.
Simply put, it was a do or die situation. Time was ticking, and there were only 14 days to do the impossible task of jumping 15 thousand ranks.
All this batch jumping business had brought my daily hours to a more normal 8, but the new pressure pushed it straight back to 14.
In the next 14 days, I gave me 3 Mains tests each day (which last for 3 hours each), and completed detailed analyses of all of them, on the same day. Nothing like a fire of an impossible deadline, with a do or die situation, to push you to extremes.
On the day of the exam, I left the exam center genuinely confused about how it had gone. I had done the best I could under the circumstances, but there was no way of knowing if it was enough.
10 days of tense waiting after the exam, the results were declared at 1am. I was through! 99.55 percentile meant that I got to stay!
To this day, it is unclear to me if it was the sheer amount of mock tests I had given that gave me an edge, or a supreme act of God. Either way, it got the job done.