From: CKORENT@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Wed Oct 11 2000 - 21:00:17 GMT-3
I made it on my second attempt last Saturday in RTP. I have not been a real
active participant on this list, but I read it almost every day and got a lot o
f
good information from it. I don't know if I have any useful insight to give, a
s
most of what I would say has already been said somewhere in the archives. For
those that are interested, here is my story.
I have been working with Cisco gear for 3 years now. Almost exactly a year ago
,
I decided to get my CCIE. I passed the written exam in February this year and
took the lab for the first time in August in RTP. I did really well and was th
e
only one to make it to the second day. Unfortunately, I made a couple of
stupid mistakes on the first day, so I barely made it to the second day. This,
of course, meant that I needed to be almost perfect in the morning of day 2 if
I
was going to make it to troubleshooting. I missed it by about 2 points. This
was tough to take at first, because I was really confident that I would be one
those people that passed on the first try.
I scheduled my next attempt right away and the earliest I could get was in
December sometime. I felt that I was at my peak and just needed a little work
before I took the test again. A December date would make that difficult becaus
e
there was no way I could stay at my peak for 4 months. Luckily, I switched wit
h
someone from this list so that I could get a date in October. So after a 2 wee
k
break, I began studying again for my next attempt in RTP. I had put a lot of
pressure on myself the first try which caused me to have difficulty sleeping an
d
eating. I tried to have a different attitude this time. I did not worry so
much about passing...if I didn't make it, I would just try it again. I think
this attitude helped, because I was much more comfortable this time. I only
missed one 3-point question on day 1, so I had a nice cushion going into day 2
(one other person made it to the second day also). Day 2 was a long one. I
think we had fairly new proctor, because it was 4 hours between finishing the
morning of day 2 and starting the troubleshooting section. But, about 8:00PM
the proctor shook my hand and handed me my number. What a feeling!
Here is what I found most helpful for studying:
I had a nice rack of equipment to play with every night (9 routers). For VOIP
and ATM, I bought a couple of days of rack time at the University of Minnesota
CCIE lab.
I had two ISDN lines for testing dialup scenarios.
I went through all the ccbootcamp labs. Some of them I went through a couple o
f
times.
I went through all of the fatkid.com labs.
I read through a lot of books over the last year...just about every Cisco Press
book. The books I found most helpful for the lab were :
Doyle's Routing TCP/IP
Halabi's Internet Routing Architectures (I think the 2nd edition is easier to
read then the 1st...better typesetting)
Caslow's Cisco Certification: Bridges, Routers and Switches for CCIE's
I spent a lot of time going through the Documentation CD and building scenarios
on the areas I was weak in.
Some of the Networkers presentations were useful, especially the CCIE Power
Session from this year.
Well, that's about it,
Chris Korent
CCIE #6288
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