Considering 10 Months As An Ideal Time To Crack UPSC
Followings Are Our Suggestion By Our Subject Matter Experts:
1. Coaching is not an End
You must understand at the very beginning about what’s helping you and what plainly wasting your time. If as a student, you feel that certain classes are coming out as unhelpful—avoid going for them. You can spend the same time at self-study or watch some relevant documentaries.
2. Consistent Assessment
Evaluate yourself on a monthly basis and pick out the most challenging subjects for you. Enroll yourself for test series—and get an assessment on regular gaps. This would give you weak subjects to work upon. Post figuring out your weak subjects—start with reading the standard text and avoid over strategizing it. Once you start with this method—with time your weak subjects would change and subsequently all your subjects would be strong. A consistent change in your weak subjects is a good sign and it indicates that you are working on yourself.
3. If your medium of exam is English, improve it!
It’s not necessary to get a coaching for your broken English—the best way to improve it is by regular reading, be it your academic books or fictional comics, followed by writing practice sessions. For learning a new vocabulary—’The Hindu’ suffices. It’s highly advisable to maintain a dictionary and make notes of the new words and revise them.
Your expression is as important as your factual knowledge. You must practice writing rhetoric essays from the very start of your preparation and get it assessed by a peer or a faculty.
4. Avoid Social Media
Its fruit is so minute compared with the time that it demands, you can do anything else but scrolling through your news feed. Certain regular updates from UPSC related pages and groups might give you a sense that it’s necessary to upgrade yourself with ever updating news feed and strategies. Serious aspirants avoid this and keep their social media very limited.
Of course, you could experiment with blogs or some writers in Quora to get an insight from the first-hand fighters, but that’s your own call.
5. Get out of the illusion
There is a stadium full of aspirants who want to be an IAS officer under three months—or less. Our social media pages are filled with these amateur candidates—demanding for a quick strategy for UPSC 2017 with only a couple of months left for it. These are the same candidates who think they are destined to be an IAS officers, or worse—our country needs their service from tomorrow—that they would change the intricate structure of administration in India from the day one—like that actor in a Bollywood movie.
You can easily differentiate serious contenders from the amateur ones from the way they approach the Civil services.
Get Real! The preparation required to be a Civil Servant is much more than one amateur aspirant would imagine. Consider this: under three months or less, you can’t expect to know about the history of our great nation, or its great independence struggle, or the problems it faced and facing, or its relationship with the other countries, its political and demographic structure, its economic problems or security problems, or ample knowledge of constitution and its working, or global events—let alone its diversity and geography.
6. Keep yourself Motivated
The entire system of UPSC is meant to break you down. It tests your patience and hard-work under so many levels—that if your inspiration comes from the power and perks the position of IAS offers, you’re doomed to failure. This nature of this exam is designed to exhaust you.
Look at the scene—you prepare for this exam for at least a year and then the exam itself is conducted in three stages—in a stretch of a year. It does have that effect—which at the back of your head—whispers—every now and then—Give Up! Give Up! Give Up!
Don’t!