How I did It- Psychology notes!!!

Guys!

I am pleased to share my psychology  notes. I had scored 249 in psycho (one of the highest).Notes of paper 2 shall follow soon.

How to use these
1) Please use them only as ADD ONs and not as your mainstay of psycho prep. There is NO substitute to textbooks like Baron, Ciccarelli etc
2) The Doc files are the most important files. Read other files (pdfs etc) only when you have sufficient time.
3)Key: CIC means Ciccarelli, PM=printed material, CN=class notes,Baron=Baron, Morgan=Morgan and King

Here is the link: https:

Paper 1
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/58o3kmju8rppf62/AACyCo1yxl_ZgntFqBF-kWRCa

Paper 2
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/sauzszd0rs5fswt/AAB69EC4bUo-jObbQJ-DXaLEa

How I did It- My Marksheet

CIVIL SERVICES (MAIN) EXAMINATION, 2013

ROLL NO. :	456769
NAME :	PRABHAV JOSHI
MARKS OBTAINED

SUBJECTS MARKS ESSAY (PAPER-I) 125 GENRAL STUDIES -I (PAPER-II) 074 GENRAL STUDIES -II (PAPER-III) 059 GENRAL STUDIES -III (PAPER-IV) 076 GENRAL STUDIES -IV (PAPER-V) 088 OPTIONAL-I (PSYCHOLOGY) (PAPER-VI) 118 OPTIONAL-II (PSYCHOLOGY) (PAPER-VII) 131 WRITTEN TOTAL 671 PERSONALITY TEST 204 FINAL TOTAL 875

Remarks :-RECOMMENDED For the sake of comparison, my marks in CSM 2012 were MARKS OBTAINED SUBJECTS MARKS ESSAY (PAPER- III) 081 GENRAL STUDIES (PAPER- IV) 123 GENRAL STUDIES (PAPER- V) 091 OPTIONAL- I(PSYCHOLOGY) (PAPER- VI) 101 OPTIONAL- I(PSYCHOLOGY) (PAPER- VII) 116 OPTIONAL- II(GEOGRAPHY) (PAPER- VIII) 78 OPTIONAL- II(GEOGRAPHY) (PAPER- IX) 128 WRITTEN TOTAL 718 PERSONALITY TEST 160 FINAL TOTAL 878 My marks in 2012 were pretty competitive except in essay and the interview.  MORAL OF THE STORY:  INTERVIEW and ESSAY can see you in and out of the IAS! My strategy for the interview and essay shall follow soon.

How I did it- Self study vs Group Study

STUDYING IN A GROUP VS STUDYING ALONE

Dear Friends!

One of my juniors from BITS Pilani had asked whether one should study in group or prefer self study. Here is my take on the issue

I am strongly in favour of studying alone for mains. In the interview stage interacting/studying in group obviously helps. More on interview preparation later...

Why I did nt like studying in a group

1)      Snatches away your freedom to study at your own pace and in your own style

2)      Is uncomfortable- time and energy wasted in travelling to a common place, chit chatting etc

3)      Multiple inputs from multiple people may lead to confusion, information overload etc

On the other hand, some of the successful guys I know used to study in groups.

The obvious advantages of studying in groups

1)       is that you can divide the coursework amongst yourself.

2)      Peer pressure increases your motivation

 I personally feel that technology has enabled to collaborate electronically now. So I prefer virtual interaction rather than going to someone’s house and wasting time travelling, chit chatting etc

What we did was we made an online group. We used that for

1)       getting our doubts cleared- specially helped me a lot in psychology

2)      Sharing relevant articles/information. Anyone who came across something relevant which others would have missed, he/she used to share it on the group. VERY VERY USEFUL for preparation of topics like environment/SnT for which specific textbooks are not available

3)      Getting our answers peer reviewed

Studying in groups can help when

·         All the members of the group are highly and equally motivated

·         Are of  similar capabilities

·         The group size is small

I have tried to cover as many aspects of group ‘study vs self study’ issue as I could. In case I have missed out anything, please feel free to ask in the comments section below!

How I did it-UPSC Civil Services Mains-ANSWER WRITING

ANSWER WRITING-MAINS

1.       The first and the foremost thing is to READ the question well and UNDERSTAND what has been asked! You may think its trivial but due to paucity of time in the mains exam, people write what they know and NOT what has been asked! I used to underline the key terms in the question and also used to look back at the question mid way to ensure that I was notstraying from the track

2.       Point wise vs Paragraph form: Writing In points increases the readability of the answer and makes life easier for the examiner. Whenever I had sufficient points, I wrote in point formats. BUT in questions where I did nt have enough points, I had to write in paragraph form to beat around the bush. NOTE: beating around the bush is not advisable as it only consumes your time without giving much return. It better to answer comeback to this question later after answering questions that you know well.

3.       Answer writing ‘skills’-There is NOTHING- let me emphasize again- NOTHING  called ‘answer writing skills’. Just write down all the points that you have!! Completing the paper in itself is such a tough task, forget anything else! CONTENT is the single most important thing. I recommend first thinking for a minute and jotting down all the points in rough and then arranging them in order of importance in the final answer. 

4.       SPEED SPEED SPEED: If you see, the questions this time around were not very tough but the papers were very lengthy. Writing speed is hence of PARAMOUNT importance. Increase it any cost. I still painfully remember leaving out questions like string of pearls, maldivian crisis in paper 2 because I had spent too much time on the earlier questions 

5.       Underlining key words helps.

6.       Stick to the word limit: there are few questions about which you will know a lot. One feels tempted to write down pages and pages for that question (out of sheer joy!). I must have written at least 3 pages on that Nagaland petroleum exploration license question. Avoid doing this! Not sticking to the word limit will cost you time. Hence I recommend sticking to the TIME limit for every question rather than the word limit.

7.       Practise Practise Practise!: form a group of 2/3 people. Take up a predecided topic and write 2 questions DAILY on the topic chosen. Get yourself peer reviewed. We used this technique in Psycho. We formed a online group of 3 people and used to fix up a chapter a day earlier and then used to write down 2 random questions from the old question papers the next day. Spend at least 30-40 minutes on answer writing

8.      Test series: enrol yourself in at least one test series. A test series gives you a schedule to stick to ensuring that you complete the syllabus well within the time and in a balanced way. Writing a paper for 3 hours gives you the actual feel of the exam. Many of my friends used to skip the tests because of non completion of syllabus. Please NEVER do this and appear in all tests and write as much you know. I had joined synergy test series for GS and found it to be very useful. Over 1000 candidates appear in that and my rank used to hover around 30.

I had joined vision IAS test series (psycho and geo) during my first attempt because I was preparing from Chittaurgarh, my hometown. Initially they used to evaluate my answersheets promptly but as  mains approaced, their processing time increased.  Vision’s review varies from subject to subject. But in general its allright for people who are not in delhi. The good thing about them is obviously the flexibilty to choose where and when to write.

 Don’t enrol in too many test series. I did not join any for Psycho. Lastly and the most importantly, 

DO NOT MISS THE FULL SYLLABUS TESTS HELD JUST BEFORE THE EXAMS

9.      Pen: I am a big fan of flair’s writo meter. Its smooth and the fastest but not comfortable. Choose a pen which suites you and is comfortable. Some people write in black ink too.

10.  Hand writing: needless to say, it should be legible. But those like me who have horrific handwriting need not worry! Just write in bigger sized fonts with greater spacing to improve the readabilty

11.  Language: you don’t need to be a Kalidas or a Shakespeare. Use simple and short sentences. Language is no issue if you have good content

12.  Examples: giving examples always help. Specially while explaining technical terms/phenomena

13.   Diagrams: in questions of geography specially and even otherwise, a diagram always help. But make sure its clear and does nt eat up much of your time

14.   Long term approach for improving Answer writing and Essays: start blogging!

To sum up, answer writing skills are nothing but content and time management. It’s a difficult task to complete the paper itself, forget adding frills!

I have tried to cover as many aspects of answer writing as I could. In case I have missed out anything, please feel free to ask in the comments section below!

 

THE SOLUTION. Part 2 of 2

For better organization, I am dividing my suggestions as long term and short term

SHORT TERM

1)    Focus on penalty conversion: PC conversion has become perhaps the most convensient  way to win matches in modern hockey

2)    Strengthen defence: working hard on basics always pays

3)    Play more and more tough matches: the more we play against European teams and Australia, the better it is for us. HIL is a great platform is this regard as it exposes our youngsters to some of the worlds best player. The players can learn a lot from them, their training regimen

4)    Fitness: as mentioned in the earlier post, out fitness level our not comparable to the Europeans. Okay we can grant our players some excuse on the basis of heredity and genes. But we must target youngsters and develop them into athletes who can run back and forth for the complete 60 minutes

5)    And some sports psychology: as some commentators have said that a team’s self confidence takes a beating when it looses consistently against other teams. I think we need to instill the ‘Yes WE CAN’ feeling in our team mates. Also regular yoga exercises might be helpful in holding the concentrations levels high even in the dying minutes of the game when we tend to falter the most

The Long term ones

1)    Making more and more stadiums of astro turfs: we are woefully short of adequate infrastructure with only about 40 astroturfs in India as compared to 440 in Netherlands which is such a small country. In germany, every school and college has one astro turf

2)    Revamping our sport administration : as supreme court has said, the sports bodies should be administered by sportspersons only. The politicians ans businessmen are responsible for the rot in the system (yes! These are SC’s own words)

3)    Have more competitions like HIL: we should encourage our players to participate in league tournaments of other nations

4)    Revive the club culture:

5)    Trap them young : encourage schemes like come and play scheme of govt of Delhi in which children are being allowed to use the infrastructure made during the commonwealth games. This can be extended to our village level where we should throw open the playgrounds of schools to every child of the neighbourhood.  Talent needs to be indentified in platforms like PYKKA

6)    Training of coaches: specially at the ground level. A senior foreign coach has remarked that our coaches are involved more in politicking and no body wants to learn from another. Every one teaches in one’s own style and there is no standardized training method

7)    Increase facilities and incentives at the SAI academies

SUGGESTIONS FOR INDIAN HOCKEY – PART 1 OF 2

After a long time we hockey fans  had some reasons to cheer. India’s world ranking improved to 8^th from the 11^th position. The team also defeated former  world  champions germany after a gap of 10 years. One hopes that our team continues to improve and these green shoots of change are not transitory

 Lets analyse the main weak points of the Indian national team.  

1)    Fitness- we just don’t seam to have the stamina to last for the entire 70 minutes. This was recently seen very clearly in our hero world league match against Australia where we scored 3 quick  goals but ultimately lost the game by 8-3. Hopefully the reduction of playing time to 60 minutes (4 quarters of 15 minutes) should go in our favor since our players will get more time to recoup. We need a long term perspective plan to increase thee players muscle strength, specially targeting the youngsters.

2)    Defence- faults inside the circle in the dying minutes have proved to be India’s nemesis on a regular basis. We need to clearly work more on trapping the ball neatly says Jamie Dwyer, the Australian legend. I myself find the footwork of few burly defenders of our team rather slow.

3)    Penalty corner conversion- this is one area which has scene considerable improvement in recent years but still there is a lot of scope for improvement. We do have talented drag flickers like the young Rupindar Pall, Raghunath but I see that our team is not yet confident enough to try some variations which makes it very predictable for the opposite team to defend. As we all know that PC conversion has become a major source of goals, we should work on a long term plan to produce players who can net the ball like a machine gun

4)    Clinging  to the ball: I see our players hold on to the ball a lot longer than is perhaps necessary.  Perhaps this is because as youngsters they have been coached in the Indian philosophy of individual artistry. But this no more helps in the present era of short passes. We need to rectify this and train our players to eject the ball as soon as possible

I will discuss what according to me can be the solution to the crisis in hockey  in my next post

HOW TO CRACK GATE AND OTHER PSU EXAMS(CHEMICAL)

Hey!

GATE has now become important as some 4/5 PSUs are recruiting through it. It should require preparation for about 3/4 months to crack this exam. I scored a rank of 36 in 2013 with 67/100 marks. In general category one has to get below AIR 60 to be really sure of selection.

        From 2013, GATE was made online. Many of the answers are now required to be filed in numerically using the keyboard (ie they are not of the multiple choice types) So, one has to be thorough with the concepts. Yes! CONCEPTS hold the key as the questions are generally easy but conceptual. Accuracy, of course has become very important.

Regarding chemical engineering courses, all of them are important and must be thoroughly prepared.  BUT, it is very important to have an idea about the pattern of questions being asked. MOST IMPORTANT part of your preparation shall be solving the previous year GATE question papers (say last 20 years) available on www.unitoperation.com. Analyze the pattern and focus on areas where questions are being asked regularly. Every year they tend to ask similar questions from same areas. For example, there shall always be some questions on ‘drying’.

The 15 marks of English and mental ability should not require any special preparation as such. In fact, this area is quite scoring.

Questions from the 15 mark section of engineering mathematics are usually very easy. But due to the length/coverage of the syllabus, people tend to go unprepared. DONT DO this mistake. I found GATE maths book by ‘MADE EASY’ very suitable in this regard.

Thankfully, many of the chemical engg. courses are now available online at www.nptel.iitm.ac.in (NPTEL). Make full use of this resource as they have covered the courses very concisely

GENERAL GUIDELINES

·       Practice practice practice!!! Giving tests in exam like situations always helps

·       Coaching: thankfully, there are not many coaching institutes offering coaching in chemical engg. Coaching is NOT required as such if you can follow a disciplined approach. I have heard of this institute called Vaani (Hyderabad) which offers test series (and coaching also). Joining a test series should be beneficial as it gives momentum to your preparation

·       Be VERY THOROUGH with the important topics I have listed below

·       Do NOT leave any topic untouched while preparation. Try to cover the entire syllabus as sometimes a very easy question might be asked from the topic you left. This is specially the case with engineering mathematics portion

·       They are going to test your basic concepts especially in the one markers. So, have a good read of the theoretical portion of the textbooks Ex. Internal energy is a  state function/path function ? (2013).

CAUTION: LIST OF IMPORTANT TOPICS IS NOT EXHAUSTIVE!!!

KINETICS AND REACTOR DESIGN

·       V. Imp: Questions worth About 10 marks

·       Book/source: H S fogler

·       Imp subtopics

1.  Pseudo steady state hypothesis

2.  Questions based on design equations on CSTR, PFR, PBR

3.  Residence time distribution, Exit age function etc

4.  Diffusion effects in catalysis, pore diffusion etc

5.  single and multiple reactions in ideal reactors, 

·       Little difficult to prepare as fogler is full of complex examples which cannot be asked in GATE. Becomes difficult to decide what to study and what not!

MASS TRANSFER OPERATIONS

·       V. Imp: Questions worth About 10 marks

·       Book/source: NPTEL, TREYBAL

·       Imp subtopics

1.  2 film and other theories of diffusion

2.  Absorption-HTU, NTU concepts

3.  Distillation

4.  Counter and co current interphase mass transfer

5.  Drying

HEAT TRANSFER OPERATIONS

·       V. Imp: Questions worth About 10 marks

·       Book/source: NPTEL, J P Holman

·       VERY  scoring subject. Make sure you attempt well

·       Need not remember all the complex correlations. Just remember sieder tate and dietus bolter

·       Imp subtopics

1.  Counter and co current heat exchangers, LMTD concept etc

2.  Basics of radiation

3.  Importance/significance of various dimensionless numbers

4.  Biot number and lumped heat capacity problems

5.  Evaporators

6.  boiling

FLUID FLOW OPERATIONS

·        Imp: Questions worth About 6-8 marks

·       Book/source: NPTEL, FOX AND MC DONALD

·       Imp subtopics

1.  Pumps, NPSH

2.  Bernoulli theorem and its applications

3.  Concept of wetted perimeter

4.  Non Newtonian fluids (basic definition only)

5.  Fluidized beds

6.  Mixing and agitation- power number.

7.  Hagen–Poiseuille equation

8.  elementary boundary layer theory,

9.  free and hindered settling; 

PROCESS CONTROL

·       V.Imp: Questions worth About 10 marks

·       Book/source: SEBORG

·       Imp subtopics

1.  PID controller

2.  Feedback and feed forward control

3.  Routh and nyquist stability criteria

4.  Control characteristic of valves

5.  Characteristic curves of first and second order processes

PROCESS/EQUIPMENT DESIGN

·       NOT VERY imp. Questions worth About 4/5 marks

·       Book/source: chapter 2 of James M Douglas

·       Its not covered well at BITS. Don’t spend much time if you can’t understand

·       Imp subtopics

1.  Depreciation

2.  Annuity, amortization

3.  Optimization (refer old questions)

PROCESS CALCULATION

·       NOT VERY imp. Questions worth About 4marks

1.  Book/source: Himmelblau (few chapters)

·       Easy to score if you know your concepts well. Don’t spend much time on questions you have not practiced well. This happened to me. I spent a lot of time in solving a recycle and purge question because all of them seem doable. Ended up wasting a lot of time

·       IMP subtopics

2.  Humidity definitions

3.  Recycle and purge calculations

4.  Crystallization

CHEMICAL ENGG. THERMODYNAMICS

·       V.Imp: Questions worth About 10 marks

·       Book/source:  book by smith, ness and abbott.

·       Imp subtopics

1.  Solution thermodynamics –fugacity, excess properties etc

2.  Application of laws of thermo to equipments/process. Eg throttling is isoenthalpic

3.  Degree of freedom analysis

4.  Application of raoult’s law, henry’s law etc

5.   partial molar properties

CHEMICAL PROCESS TECHNOLOGY

·       V.Imp: Questions worth About 7/8 marks

·       Book/source:  NPTEL is a very good source

·       Very scoring

·       Imp subtopics

1.  Petro refining and petrochemicals

2.  Remember catalysts of major processes

3.  Polymerization (step, condensation), methods of polymerization like bulk, emulsion etc

4.  Sulfuric acid

MECHANICAL OPERATIONS/SELECTED CHEMICAL ENGG. OPERATIONS

·       Imp: Questions worth About 7/8 marks

·       Book/source:  McCabe and Smith is a very good source

·       Very scoring

·       Imp subtopics

1.  Cyclones

2.  Taylor series of sieves

3.  Bond’s law

CHEM ENGG. MATHEMATICS

·       VERY Imp: Questions worth  15 marks

·       Book/source: MADE EASY’S mathematics book is a very good source

·       Very scoring

·       In case you are unable to solve a question from differential equation etc, try putting the options to get the answer :) !!!

·       Imp subtopics

1.  Cauchy’s, residual theorem

2.  Numerical methods

3.  Directional(partial) derivatives

4.  Gauss’s, Green’s theorem etc

5.  Mean, median, mode, standard deviation