I would like to congratulate you on securing a decent percentile in CAT. Your hard work and consistency has paid off and you will definitely land up in a good B-School, provided you work hard in preparing yourself up for Group Discussion and Personal Interviews.

I am giving you the list of colleges that you can hope to get a call from, if you apply to them.

Now, coming to your query, your sectional percentiles are fine. But if you are an engineer and a general candidate, you won’t be getting any calls from the IIMs except IIM Ranchi(HRM Course), IIM Jammu and few other newer IIMs. But getting into them would not be a clever choice since most of the baby IIMs are struggling with placements. Of course, you will have the IIM tag but placements will suffer. That is the call you have to take.

However, since you have a decent enough percentile in CAT, I will assume that your preparation were also to the fullest. You must go for other exams and try to score there. Exams like SNAP, TISS NET, CMAT, X-GMT serves as a gateway to several other Tier-1 B-Schools . SIBM-Pune, SCMHRD-Pune, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, SIMSREE-Mumbai, JBIMS-Mumbai are among the top colleges which accept these scores. However, you can also appear for XAT to try getting into XLRI-Jamshedpur.

If you are going for a drop year and you are sure enough to bring a higher percentile in CAT the next year, then you should try getting into a full time job as candidates with work-experience are given due advantage during the selection process. However, you can continue your preparation by giving as many mocks as possible since your fundamentals are strong.

Start reading newspapers and be updated about latest happenings, both locally and globally. Colleges like IIMs will test your knowledge on current affairs. Written ability tests are also game changers as you should be fast enough to write on a given topic within the allowed word limit. You should get yourselves familiar with caselets and how to solve them because in a few B-Schools, Case Presentations are also included into the selection rounds.

I hope I have been able to answer your query. All the best!!!