From: Scott Benton (spyral_architect@xxxxxxxxx)
Date: Sun Jul 30 2000 - 16:12:59 GMT-3
Does anyone know where the love of God goes when
the proctor turns hours to minutes? (apologies to Mr.
Lightfoot) What an experience! I arrived in San
Francisco on 7/25 and drove down to my hotel in
Milpitas. My lab was scheduled for 7/26-7/27 and a
7/28 departure from frisco. I have come to the
conclusion that the lab is a very personal experience
and you have to have a plan tailored to you in order
to get through it. Unfortunately, this may mean that
your first attempt is a total crapshoot as far as what
to expect and how you react to it. Needless to say, I
didn't make it to the second day.
I arrived at building C on Tuesday morning. The
headgames that I have heard about in San Jose were
non-existent. Pretty much read the NDA and agree to
it, then it's down to business. I was given my morning
material and started in. The majority of the material
was not that hard, but there was ALOT of it. The
amount of afternoon material was even more
overwhelming. You really have to have your keyboarding
skills up to speed and cut and paste everything you
possibly can. I will echo the wisdom of others...the
objective is not to configure everything, but to get
as many points as possible. I think I tried to
over-manage my time, if you can believe that. I have
read so much about time management and kept this in
the forefront of my mind...and this was ultimately my
downfall. For the majority of the material, I was able
to configure 95% of what was required. There would be
an option that I was unfamiliar with, so I would
research for 5-10 minutes and then move on with hope
of returning later. I was overly worried about
spending too much time on a topic. I also did not have
the time to do the normal verification after each step
that a technology was working as intended. The devil's
in the details. If I had spent more time on most steps
digging to find the info I needed to complete that
step, I would have gained many more points. On my next
attempt, I need to fight the urge to skip to the next
area and finish the sections to gain the points. As it
stood, although the majority of the technology was
fuctioning, I did not complete ALL of enough of the
sections. There really was not much time to do
research on things that I was unfamiliar with.
Much of the time constraint is also due to
unfamiliarity with the environment and lab hardware. A
few minutes saved in one are can be golden in another.
Also, keep in mind that troubleshooting doesn't start
in the troubleshooting section. Know IOS versions and
what workarounds you may need to employ to make IOS
and hardware work together.
8 of us started day 1. 1 of us continued to Day
2. It was a grueling experience. I don't look forward
to going through it again, but now I'm so pumped to
beat this damn test that I can't wait to have another
go. Unfortunately, we were also told that the waiting
list for the lab has been eliminated temporarily. They
are moving to an on-line registration and until this
is implemented, we all have to take the next available
date. San Jose is into the middle of November now. I
didn't ask if this applied to all of the lab
locations. I was hoping to take another run at it
sometime in September, but this may not be possible
now. I am scheduled to take Caslow's class in New York
at the end of August and along with a little more in
depth IGP study and a couple more thourough readings
of the IOS command reference, I should do much better
next time. I just hope I don't have to wait too long.
Scott
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Thu Jun 13 2002 - 08:23:59 GMT-3