You teach all day, maybe in a private school with long hours and strict rules. By the evening you are tired, and UGC NET still has to happen.
Several students have told me in the comments that teaching and studying together feels impossible. It is possible, and some of our best results have come from people in exactly your position.
The short answer
Do not quit your job to prepare. Keep teaching, give one to two focused hours a day, cut the syllabus down to five or six units, and revise the same material again and again.
Use the small gaps in your day, like your commute, for recall.
Why I do not tell you to quit
Many students put their whole life on hold for this one exam. I have seen what a year of sitting at home does.
The frustration builds up, and frustration does not help anyone study. Whatever qualification you have today, start working with it.
Teach in a school or a college, take a contractual post, and build experience. Do not leave a gap year in your CV, because time will pass anyway.
Teaching while you prepare also keeps the subject alive in your head.
Meghna qualified while teaching in a private college
Meghna Roy from West Bengal had already cleared the West Bengal SET, and in two earlier UGC NET attempts she qualified only for PhD admission. Before she started teaching, she spent a full year at home on this exam.
She read book after book, from the Routledge history to one Indian literature book after another, and every time she sat the exam something was still missing. In the end she got frustrated, took a teaching job in a private college, and kept studying on the side.
With the job, she could give only one or two hours a day, where earlier she had studied all day. She qualified with the shorter hours.
What changed was her approach. She stopped trying to cover everything and focused on five or six units.
She revised far more: she went through the Routledge history 15 to 16 times. And she stopped dropping revision to chase every new area she saw in the paper.
She also told me the working day made her more productive. She would come home with the pressure of finishing two more chapters for herself that day, and that pressure helped her work better.
My conversation with Meghna Roy, who qualified UGC NET English while teaching full time.
Your commute is study time
Raghvendra Pal, another former student, once ran a 6 am coaching batch, worked at a bank from 10 to 5:30 and taught again in the evening. Later he left the bank for teaching, and while running his own coaching he qualified JRF on his third attempt.
When people tell him they have a job and no time, his answer is that they have time on the bus. If you have read the structuralists once, you can revise them in your head while you travel: who came first, who wrote what, who came next.
A one-to-two-hour daily plan
| Slot | What to do |
|---|---|
| About 60 minutes, weekdays | Paper 2 core: British literature, literary theory and literary criticism. One book per subject, for example William J. Long for British literature and Pramod K. Nayar for theory, cut down into short notes. |
| 20 to 30 minutes | Paper 1. Start with research methods and higher education, which are factual and need memorising. |
| Commute and breaks | Recall without books: timelines, authors and their works. |
| Weekend | Topic-wise PYQs for whatever you finished that week, and update your revision chart. |
What not to do
Do not try to cover every literature on the syllabus. Caribbean, Canadian, Australian: there is no end to it, and Meghna made the same mistake in her second and third attempts before settling on five or six units.
Do not stop revising what you have already done just because the last paper had a few questions from somewhere new. And do not spend your limited evenings on four-hour marathon videos while making notes from all of them.
That is a black hole, and working people cannot afford it.
Time will pass anyhow, so keep doing something. A small step every day adds up over the long run. Nakul Grover
Short on time? If you would rather not build your own material, our course gives you the notes, video lectures and daily doubt sessions with me on Google Meet, so your one or two hours go into study, not note-making.
How our online coaching worksFrequently asked questions
Is two hours a day enough to qualify UGC NET English?
It can be, if those hours go into a narrow syllabus and repeated revision. Meghna Roy qualified while teaching full time with one to two hours a day.
Should I quit my teaching job to prepare?
No. A year at home often brings frustration rather than results.
Keep teaching, build experience and prepare alongside.
How many subjects should a working teacher cover?
Five or six units are enough. Start with British literature, literary theory and literary criticism, plus Paper 1.
More help: the UGC NET English guide, the syllabus and the free topic-wise PYQs.
