Wasted 1 year of preparation, Now the fear of disappointing my parents is eating me alive.

23M. My GATE exam is scheduled for February 16. I graduated last year in May and appeared for last year's GATE in Civil Engineering, barely scoring above the cutoff.

In July, I moved to Delhi, took a drop year, and joined coaching to prepare. However, I couldn’t stay consistent. I attended lectures diligently for the first half of the course but started skipping the rest as self-doubt and negativity crept in, I felt I couldn’t crack GATE and ESE with just 4-5 months of preparation. Class hours were long with barely any time for revision and Problem solving.

Procrastination got the better of me. I believed coaching institutes dragged the syllabus unnecessarily, making students sit for 10-12 hours a day. I thought I’d be better off taking an online pirated course and covering the syllabus in fast-forward mode. Again, I couldn’t stay committed.

Now, I’m stuck. I have a pile of subjects I covered in the first half, while the remaining are untouched. I was overconfident, thinking I could cover the syllabus on my own. It never occurred to me that those slogging in coaching weren’t dumb, they were probably just as anxious as I was, yet they showed up every day and put in the effort.

This situation is the consequence of my own actions. Now, I don’t know what to do except try to revise the subjects I have already covered and catch up on 2-3 smaller subjects using GATE PYQs and short notes.

Don’t make the same mistakes I did.