By Vijyaditya Singh Dhakare | PGP 2024

Let me tell you something about forest officers that nobody told me at the age of 21 when I was in my final year of engineering: you will spend a meaningful portion of your twenties explaining to a leopard, through sheer willpower and a government-issued uniform, that the village on the other side of that tree is not, in fact, on the menu tonight. I know this because I spent three and a half years as a Forest Range Officer at Ratapani Wildlife Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh, leading government officials, managing man-animal conflicts with tribal communities, and conducting the All India Tiger Census — which, I promise you, is exactly as dramatic as it sounds.

My career, if you drew it on a whiteboard, would look less like a roadmap and more like a child’s first attempt at a Spirograph. Civil Engineering at NIT Bhopal. Gazetted Forest Services. IIM Ahmedabad. A nano-influencer startup called LetsViral.in (yes, really). A global consulting firm role. And now — a CAT prep startup.

If you’re waiting for the thread that ties this together, I’ll save you some time: there isn’t one. That is the thread.

When I cracked the CAT in 2022 and got into IIMA, I became something of an accidental celebrity in my social circle. Suddenly, every ambitious 22-year-old cousin, every batchmate’s younger sibling, every neighbour’s kid who’d heard “IIM” and thought that sounds like a plan started sliding into my DMs. Could I look at their mock scores? Could I review their study plan? Could I explain what “DILR” stands for and why it had personally wronged them?

I started mentoring. Casually at first. Then seriously. And somewhere between explaining DILR hacks to a working professional at 11 pm and watching a banker prepare to study 2,000 hours for an exam she needed to crack in three months, something clicked.

The CAT prep market, I realised, was systematically lying to aspirants — not out of malice, but out of business model. Big coaching makes money by selling volume: 20 books, 100 mocks, 400 hours of recorded lectures. The logic is more content = more value = more fee justified. But the student who most needs to crack CAT is not a student with infinite time — it’s a person with a job or college exam, balancing a 40-minute commute back to the rented house, and the very real possibility of a Monday morning college exam derailing Sunday’s study plan.

Nobody was building for this person.

Meanwhile, I was doing well at Oliver Wyman, where I got placed after IIMA. Life was in the ivory towers — strategy projects, CXO conversations, top hotels and international trips- the whole consultant starter pack. I was working on genuinely interesting problems. By any reasonable metric, I had “made it.”

And yet. And yet.

I kept thinking about those CAT aspirants. I kept thinking about an insight that felt, uncomfortably, like it was mine to act on: the need for managers is going to grow, not shrink, as AI automates entry-level execution. The MBA is not becoming less relevant — it’s becoming more relevant, and more urgent, for people mid-career who can see exactly what’s coming for their current roles. These are sharp, motivated people who don’t need 2,000 hours of prep. They need 600 focused hours, ruthless prioritisation, and someone who will look at their Week 3 mock result on a Tuesday evening and tell them precisely — not generally — what to fix before Week 4.

That’s when I left.

In November last year, I walked away from the consulting life and joined Supergrads by Toprankers to lead their CAT Prep vertical. My mission, stated plainly: make CAT prep brutally efficient for the time-constrained student.

The approach I’ve built is deliberately against the grain. No 20-book curriculum. No one-size-fits-all schedule. Instead: crisp, modular content that respects the student’s time. And the piece I’m proudest of — the IIMentorship Program — where an IIM alumnus spends ten minutes, every single week, with one aspirant. Ten minutes. Not a lecture. Not a recorded module. A conversation: what did you do last week, where did you struggle, what does next week look like, let’s reschedule accordingly.

In a world drowning in free content, I have become deeply convinced that personalised accountability is the scarcest resource in education. Big coaching can’t offer it — they are, by design and by economics, a one-size-fits-all system. I am not interested in one size fits all. I never have been, which is probably why my career looks like a Spirograph.

People ask me sometimes if I regret leaving consulting. The honest answer is: I miss the breakfasts at Marriotts. But I don’t miss the feeling of sitting on a flight to Mumbai knowing that my first-hand insight— the one that could genuinely help a thousand people— belonged to a small notes section on my phone, while I served to execute the insights of someone else. 

The forest taught me patience. IIMA taught me frameworks. LetsViral taught me that failure at speed is still better than hesitation. Consulting taught me how large organisations think, and therefore, exactly where they can’t go.

And somewhere between a leopard in Ratapani and a whiteboard in a CAT classroom, I learned the most important lesson of an unscripted career: the path doesn’t find you. You find it — usually by taking the next step that feels most alive, even when it makes no sense on paper.

Especially then, actually.

Author Bio: 

Vijyaditya Singh Dhakare is PGP 2024, IIM Ahmedabad, and was a part of the SAC in 2023-2024. He leads the CAT Prep vertical at Supergrads by Toprankers. He was previously a Forest Range Officer and Management Consultant at Oliver Wyman. During the second year of his MBA at IIMA, he built LetsViral.in with his batchmates- a nano influencer aggregation platform.