Every winner has a mentor, it might be the legend Sachin Tendulkar or Arjuna in Mahabharata, as you noticed not only the winners or leaders, even their mentors are great personalities.
No doubt you need guidance or a mentor to help you smoothly navigate the journey, the path to success in UPSC often has too many bumps, not that it is impossible to crack this exam without any external support, but a proper guidance or mentorship will help you save time and money, don’t you think there is a difference in cracking the exam in first attempt and cracking it in sixth attempt.
Hence, you should be very careful in choosing the mentor or institute as you are going to invest a lot of money and time(which has a great opportunity cost).
Criteria to choose a proper institute:
1. Don’t fall for the result as every institute claims the same, because a student in the long journey of preparation might have been associate in some form, but the contribution of the institute to your success is only a maximum of 40%, rest is your effort.
Why is that only Arjuna became the great archer out of many students trained by Dronacharya?
Why only Sachin Tendulkar? what about the other people trained by Dronacharya Awardee and Coach of Sachin, Mr. Achrakar?
A Rigorous effort from your side is of utmost important for your success, just because you are taking coaching from a reputed institute mean you will crack the exam.
2. Look for the faculty details, many faculties are popular in youtube with great fan following, but notice the fact many of them rather than providing the correct content required they focus more on entertaining students, to be popular among them, like politicians rather than doing what is economically correct, they prefer doing what is politically correct, to be popular among the masses and that could guarantee win elections.
3. Cross check with what is being taught by. referring to UPSC Civil Services Previous Papers, helps you focus and streamline your preparation and figure out how relevant is the lecture for the exam.
4. Regularity in classes ans test series.
5. Support to clear your doubts.
