Hi, I’m Shivam Gupta. Like many of you, I decided in June 2023 that I wanted to pursue an MBA. I appeared for CAT and scored 99.88 percentile, went through the brutal rounds of GDs and interviews, and eventually converted IIM BLACKI, IIFT, MDI, and IIT Bombay (with a rejection from FMS). I finally chose IIM Ahmedabad, where I’m currently a first-year student. I’m an engineer by training and worked as a backend developer at companies like MakeMyTrip, Mendix, and FlexCar. Honestly, that phase mostly helped fund my trading account. Finance and markets have always been my core interest, and that’s the primary reason I chose to pursue an MBA. This summer, I’ll be interning with a bank in a trading and markets role, gaining hands-on exposure to how financial markets operate from the inside. In the past, I’ve worked on multiple large-scale development projects, including designing services that powered millions of transactions per hour, giving me a strong problem-solving and analytical foundation. I’m on Topmate to help you prepare for interviews in a structured and practical way. Personal interviews aren’t entirely subjective, there’s a clear pattern to how candidates are evaluated. If you learn to navigate this, you can steer the interview in your favor and maximise your chances of a direct convert. Feel free to connect anytime.