Hi everyone Today I want to share with you the story of Vaibhav Gondane. He secured AIR 25 in UPSC Civil Services Exam218. Hee from Pune Maharashtra and have done his in Instrumentation and Control Engineering from College of EngineeringPune. He graduated in 218 and in the very first attempt at age of 22 secured an AIR- 25. Now let us discuss this interesting journey further and know what things worked for him. PRELIMS He believed prelims is one of the toughest phase of this exam seeing the sheer number of people giving the exam and the consistent unpredictability that UPSC brings in the questions. To tackle prelims he followed the same general list of books Ancient History- RS Sharma Medieval History -Satish Chandra Art and Culture -Nitin Singhania+11th std. NCERT Fine Arts Modern History 3 Bipan Chandra+Spectrum Geography -11th and 12th standard NCERTs Polity -Laxmikant Economics -11th and 12th standard books on Macroeconomics and Microeconomics. Environment -Had googled major national parks sanctuariesetc. + followed questionsing in past year question papers. Science and Tech -Followed Current Affairs+ did basic study of nuclear space technology etc. from internet. Current Affairs -The Hindu newspaper and Vision IAS monthly magazine. He mentionrd the contribution of Online Coaching in his success in prelims. He was a student of online prelims test series programme of a coaching institute and regularly gave the tests on weekly high quality of questions along with detailed explanation helped me to ace my prelims. Apart from the basic books he suggested aspirants to go through the previous years question papers to understand the level of UPSC questions. It is also imperative to at-least solve around 5-6 mock tests that will help to get real exam like experience. MAINS For Mains his first advice everyone to download UPSC syllabus and practically memorise it. It will help to filter out the mains related information from the varied sources that we read for the exam. He followed the same books for mains as mentioned above. It cover other aspects he had followed Vision IAS booklets which are available online. He had made short notes on all sub-parts of GS syllabus on ever-note and revised it multiple times. With this he think answer writing is equally if not more important to clear mains with good marks. He used to write 3-4 answer daily. He had also given 8 full length mock tests at Vision IAS. In every answer he tried to give some data make a diagram flowchart map etc. wherever possible. But he also suggested not to overdo it. GS answers should cover multiple a small solution oriented conclusion is perhaps appreciated by UPSC. His focus in mains was toplete his paper and write good quality content in maximum management is crucial for this and hence a lot of answer writing practice is needed. In a nutshell will say that mains is 5% reading and 5% writing with proper time management and giving justice to majority of questions. INTERVIEW UPSC calls interview as Personality it is a test of personality and not knowledge which has already been tested in mains exam. Here the focus should be on thorough study of each and every word of Detailed Application Form predicting maximum questions that can be asked. He believes honesty confidence and calmness is rewarded in interview than mere knowledge. He believed that his success lies in reading limited books doing maximum revision giving lot of mock tests and doing answer writing practice. He further added that reading NCERT Books helped him a lot in both Prelims and Mains. Now it's my personal request to every UPSC aspirant that please read NCERT Books and if you don't have them then don't worry. I am providing you with a from where you can download them for free in PDF format. Go Guys! Get them and Study. NCERT Books For Classes 6 to 12 - Free PDF Download s Lastly he also said that UPSC is not the end of it should be treated just like an we learn during the course of preparation for UPSC is helpful throughout our life. All the best to everyone!