NEET PG Success Story : Dr. Akarsh Chavan, AIR 4256
Introspecting the events that have occurred, the people you have crossed in your life, and the lessons you have learned along the road can inspire you and catalyze you to keep you motivated.
Though everyone’s path is different, and each step is unique, we can all experience the same success at the end of the road.
Your path may not have been as clear as the next man’s, you may have struggled more, jumped the hoops twice to get the same result, but that is genuinely okay. Your journey shapes your character. Ask Dr. Akarsh Chavan, who secured AIR 4256 in NEET PG 2021 with the help of Pre-PG. Read his NEET PG preparation journey here.
The NEET PG Beginning
Dr. Akarsh Chavan says that he was an average student who just wanted to pass the exams in his UG days. His NEET journey began when he gave his first PG entrance exam in 2019 during his internship and got a rank of 75,000. He was not bothered much at that time because he knew that he did not put the right amount of effort in this direction. He was happy that he was getting his MBBS degree and have had qualified for the examination.
After the internship, just like everybody around him, he enrolled himself in an online NEET PG preparation platform to prepare for NEET PG. According to him, his friends found the classes helpful, but he could not adjust to the arrangement he had made for himself.
The classes were conducted at a pace that did not suit him. The constant competition around him also made the situation toxic. According to him, choosing the most popular institution was not the right strategy. With continuous struggles, he could not do well in his examination and therefore got a NEET PG rank of 88,000. It was even worse than he expected, and his rank was no better than his previous attempt.
Time for Introspection
Dr. Akarsh Chavan says that he felt devastated. He knew that it was a time for major introspection. He realized that he had no other choice but to repeat another year because he wanted to do the post-graduation in medical.
He found that the first most important thing to fix was to change his mindset. According to him, he was more of a pessimistic person and had an extremely negative approach toward his goals. He found that he used to focus on problems rather than solutions. Therefore, he had to do the right opposite of what he was doing.
Firstly, he opened himself to his seniors and friends who had already cleared the examinations. Also, his parents and self-help books helped him to pull up his socks. And so, he began his second drop year in 2020 March.
Fixing the Mistakes
Dr. Akarsh Chavan had now realized the problem from his previous attempt, and there were certain things that he wanted to change.
The first thing he did was to change the learning source for NEET PG exam. He had made handwritten notes because he thought it was an exciting thing to do, but now he wanted something active where he could be involved. So, he started to learn from scratch again and chose the best teachers who could teach him. This time he did not rely on the marketing strategies of the popular online platforms.
For the NEET PG MCQs and previous years’ questions, he chose Pre-PG.
“Pre-PG had been a real game changer for me. It helped me bring back the confidence that I had lost doing mcqs because I knew I would get a lot of things wrong. I knew that I had to do it anyway, so I started doing questions like 20-30 MCQs per day initially and then I moved it up to around 100 a day, where solving mcqs became more like a game than pressure. I followed the philosophy where you constantly have to measure where you stand”
says Dr. Akarsh Chavan.
According to Dr. Akarsh, the best thing about Pre-PG is the filters. He constantly used the filters of clinical questions and the previous year’s questions from 2017-2000 on Pre-PG.
“I really liked the feature PrepDNA where I constantly tried to make the things green, and the readiness index was a source of inspiration. So, when the numbers were increased, that’s’ what kept me at track. I used to give tests daily and religiously.”
Every night before sleeping, he gave the mock tests on Pre-PG and reviewed the question in the morning.
Advice to NEET PG aspirants
In the end, he decided to address other issues which came during the preparation. Dr. Akarsh Chavan says patience is important because you constantly see your friends doing the post-graduation, and there may come a time when you may feel envious of them. But it is important to understand their journey as well.
During the preparation, you may see a lot of videos from the NEET PG toppers telling a lot of techniques on how you can deal with the situation. But it all comes down to how you handle the situation yourself because everyone has their own limitations and ways of dealing with various scenarios.
Dr. Akarsh’s story teaches us that everyone has their own set of problems, and they must fight them to overcome the same. So rather than comparing yourself with somebody, it is more important that you focus on your journey, keep your head up, and make a decision that will help you achieve what you want to do in your life.
All the best!