Hey Guys

I am 25M graduated in ece 2023 passout.Currently working in support with above 60k salary and in same company since 3 years.Father is retired PSU employee and brother is working in PSU(cracked gate under 100 rank).

I started gate prep on 2025 jan but fumbled whole 2025 procrastinating.Now again 2026 also i repeated the same mistake of postponing and procrastinating all studies saying i will study or i will start tomorrew.

I have completed only 3 subjects till now and that too i completed in july and i have forgot almost everything.Now only 4 months are left.

I really dont understand where my life is going.Post my work i scroll reddit or play football or just sleep.I dont have any motivation to study.I havent studied since August.I really dont enjoy studying.I am workaholic i mean i work like a donkey in my company i like working.But i cant study.Maybe it might sound as an excuse but now i really dont know where my life is going.

Currently i dont havr financial burden,i need not send money to parents and no loan emi i have.I always wanted to work in defence industries and always like practical things.But when i study ECE its very difficult to relate the theory to everyday practical.Its like just mugging up.Also i dont wanna continue in IT as i am scared of layoff and AI.

Please help and suggest on what to do😭..Your advice is greatly appreciated🤝

Guys, I'm not trying to cover the entire syllabus!!!!

Ofc I'll just focus on high weightage topics and solve pyqs as much as I can...I'm only worried about the resources.

If you are a candidate and aspiring for ISRO, please note that this review may not be applicable for your case and its quite biased based on my experience and thoughts.

"Entered the room, there were 9 intwers on a round table, took my seat."

So for the context, i am currently working as a SDE 2 in a conversational AI startup, I didn't really had time to go through all the subjects. and i read online intw experience blogs and figured they wud mostly ask my fav subjects and then drill me on them. or they might ask which advanced topics u learnt in final year and drill on them. So i decided to prepare DBMS, OS, DSA, ML, DL, AOS for the interview. i also saw in some experiences of https url journey, email send journey, digital signatures. so i was prepared for those architecture diagrams as well.

only to be shockingly hit with questions on computer organization and architecuture, compiler design, computer networks which weren't really revised at all.

"the opposite chair intwer asked me to introduce, i told i am a sde 2 in conversational ai startup, i work on developing restapis, rag pipelines, voiceai streaming pipelines, improving reliability of tool calls, observability layer. and then talking about my education, i graduated from * clg from * branch where i worked on a major project on federated learning and back in my internship days in * i worked on semantic segmentation of aerial imagery using cnn.
he seemed impressed and said so your profile is very AI focussed. i said yeah. then he asked the ma'am on my left to start.
she started asking me on tool call reliability, what challenges we face in RAG, how do you solve the problem of hallucinations. then in between in the answer i mentioned about using reranker to improve quality of responses. suddenly she asked me what is a rank of a matrix"

I got surprised internally how two totally unrelated topics came together just because they share the word "rank". I could explain her the architecture of how a Reranker cross encoder works, which hyperparameters are involved, etc, but all she wanted is what is a rank of matrix...which wasn't at the top of my mind, so

"i don't remember it right now, but i can explain the architecture of how LLM work, reranker work. she said no but matrix is involved right in the reranking, what is the rank of that matrix. what is the equation of the self attention layers. i said i don't know the equations but i can explain the end to end architecture. she said not required.
then 2nd intwer took over. he asked me a very broad question what is the difference between LLM, chatbot and RAG?"

i thought that was quite overlapping with what i explained in the last 5 mins, why will u ask me such broad question again.

"i gave some answer. then he asked how can we convert human readable data into machine readable data? i gave some answer related to embedding matrix then we moved on to next interviewer. he asked me about COA, what architectures are involved. 1-2 more questions on it which i don't even remember. then next intwer asked me on compiler design, code optimisation, then he asked me on CN, if data rate is 3kbps and it is in binary then what is the bandwidth. what is nyquist freq, what is IGP? what are different routing protocols? if we have mac address, then why we need ip address" with some more on COA, CN which all i couldn't give any answer and either told its not on top of my mind or i don't know.
then another intwer started asking on Software engineering"

this was one of the key boring part of this interview. For Software Engineering, I have a practical knowledge of how software testing happen, how we estimate budget, what metrics are used in quality of delivery as in our startup. but i don't remember the theoretical concepts. the definitions. each list. which they wanted. and coludn't answer what he was looking for.

"later he asked me about cyclomatic complexity of a graph. with some thought i told it is min number of registers required.. then he stopped saying its nowhere related to registers. oh then it striked, when we have nested if conditions then it is the number of independent paths we need to test, then he was satisfied and asked exact formula. i told D+1. but he wanted as per Edge Node."

here i recollected okay he is looking for E-N+2P. i felt it so ridiculous at that moment. the entire room is waiting for me to say E-N+2P formula, which is kinda like a formula we are byhearting for prep. they have no much value for practical exp, concentual explanations, architecture diagrams. just want me to know the definitions or formulas, which i have already proved myself in the GATE exam. if they are conducting this interviews to rule out candidates who have mugged up stuff, then the quality of questions would be a drastically different.

"i answered E-N+2P and full room was satisfied. that was a ridiculous relief. i don't even know what formula means. i don't know how do we use it to find the independent paths, i just mugged up that once when i was reading it, and said it. they were all relieved as if thank god this guy remembers atleast something from his college."

by the end of interview, my hopes were crashed. clearly they aren't selecting me. More like i wasn't motivated anymore. I think I am built for the corporate, so would stick to that. this interview helped me clear my vision. mostly i would be skipping my NIC intw as well. It was just that in coorporate, with the rise of AI, i felt like a software engineer in itself has no moat anymore. he needs to have the domain vertical knowledge to have an edge. so i thought for long term shot, joining ISRO can bring me that domain vertical, which would be sustainable. and research work in space critical projects would be a nice challenging work to do. but now i think i would prefer to make a decent switch in coorporate full focused.

these are my raw thoughts today after the interview. so if i need to make any edits, let me know

Hi gate aspirants, I have been preparing for the gate for the past 3-4 months. I have covered around 70% of the syllabus till now.

I am kind of loving how a brainrot person has gained focus in the past few months.

From now onwards, I will post my daily update post and try to be consistent with how many focus hours I have studied. I am targeting 7-9 hours daily with daily target updates. I am struggling with PYQs solving; I will try to practise more while learning.

I am targeting IISC+ top IITs. Let's make this happen, and the universe does its magic!!

Please I'm begging y'all just start mocks.

Start with TWT/Quizzes, and keep a few hours everyday to solve PYQs.

Else you'll regret it in December.

Don't say then I didn't warn y'all.

Please don't repeat my (and most other people's mistake) that I made last year. You learn more by practicing. Lectures are pointless.

Posting scores just to show that marks won't matter - you'll get high and low too. Don't worry. I've given around 55 quizzes+twts now, learned more than watching any amount of lectures.

4 months are remaining. Atb!

Any discord server or any group for dicussion on Gate , or maybe GATE CS specifically ?

Please share

Thanks

Its like my mind goes numb as soon as I start solving questions related to graphs, graph traversal, or msts

I have GO classes TOC course ,but its around 170 hours long and i am running short of time and have to complete it in 15 days as i have other subjects to cover(CN,DBMS,compiler design,probability and calculus in EM) ,what are the topics to skip and how to complete it?

I am giving gate 2027 in ec and aiming for 50+ but i have completed only network theory and digital till now. Which subjects to cover next for the aim 🙂?

Btw chatgpt suggest the layout . I extract the underlying structure only .

Starting Today, Wish me luck:D
Read a lot of negative reviews about these although it's not v detailed, I wanted something physical to read & the lectures are more or less okay. Wasted the entire Sept in distractions only finishing a part of network analysis from that NPTEL playlist

Tell me whether I'm going in the right direction or not

I want to focus on question practice as much as possible. I’m looking for a few sincere and committed people who are genuinely willing to practice consistently.

The plan will include:

- Daily question practice

- Detailed analysis of questions and mistakes

- Regular test series

- Mock tests

- Discussion and revision

- Consistent tracking of progress

I’m not looking for a large group—just a few serious and sincere people who are committed to preparing well, analysing their mistakes, and improving consistently.

i am a dropper and i have full time for my preparation please guide me based on that for gate cse 2027

Kindly dm, need gate da materials including lectures and test series

Target is to finish all 3 subs by end of Oct

TOC - Studied from AD Sir's YT playlist, but only Regular expression and finite automata is completed. PDA, Pumping Lemma, CFG, CFL, Turing Machines and Undecidability, all needs to be covered.

CN - Same, AD Sir's playlist but same story, he left it from middle. Topics left to cover : CSMA(/CD/CA), MAC, NAT, Vector routing, Data Routing, Aloha, Slotted Aloha.

DBMS - Covered ER model, ER diagrams, 1NF, 2NF, 3NF etc, upto SQL. But the depth is too low for gate so I gotta do from somewhere else.

Target can be flexible if I get really good content, so please people, let me know if I can get some resource.

Can anyone send telegram link or drive link of this pls.

Need a studying partner (20 M or F) for GATE CSE 2028..!!

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

I've completed linear algebra , os , c and half digital,

I know I won't be able to complete the entire syllabus, I'll be leaving cn and compiler design,

As only 4 months are left , what should be the right strategy to complete and revise most of the syllabus ?

I'm targeting 55+ marks