From: azeller (azeller@xxxxxxxxxx)
Date: Thu Oct 12 2000 - 13:39:00 GMT-3
Thank you Niel, after failing for ,YES the third time, at Halifax, I was
ready to quit. Your post is greatly appreciated. I will regroup, and charge
again.
Congratulations for your well fought victory, and best of luck in the
future.
Sincerely,
Andres Zeller
niallr@attglobal.net wrote:
> Last Thursday in RTP on my fifth attempt I earned my number.
>
> I passed the written exam in June '99 with an unimpressive 74%.
>
> The first attempt was October '99 in RTP. I crashed and burned on
> day 1. Awe and general unpreparedness killed me. Left RTP wondering what
> I had been thinking. My preparation had consisted of my 3 router home
> lab, lots of cisco installs at work, and reading Caslow/Doyle/Halabi. I
> had the basics under control but I didn't have the speed.
>
> Second attempt was March '00 in RTP. Made it to day 2 but not
> troubleshooting. Had some stuff for which I wasn't ready. Still, it was
> failure to triplecheck my work that killed me. I had made some changes
> late on day 1 and didn't verify that everything else was still ok. It
> wasn't and I lost more points than I should have. My preparation this
> time included a couple more routers in the home lab and a lot more time
> configuring things and much less time reading. I had speed and breadth
> of knowledge but not enough discipline.
>
> Third attempt was June '00 in RTP. Debacle is the only adequate
> word. My CD never worked. I had a substitute proctor who was singularly
> unhelpful in resolving the problem. And the exam was poorly written,
> unlike the first two which I felt to be entirely fair. Perhaps I should
> have been less concerned with syntactical subtleties and configured what
> they wanted instead of what was requested. Left RTP a bit disappointed
> and frustrated. My preparation was very similar to that for attempt # 2.
>
> Fourth attempt was August '00 in Halifax. So close yet so far away.
> Again I didn't triplecheck things after making changes and it cost me to
> the point that I didn't continue on to troubleshooting. I was
> overconfident and thought I had nailed this one, failing to note some
> subtle twists to a couple of things. This time preparation consisted of
> a large ATM implementation and numerous smaller installs at work with
> less time on the home lab. My wife would probably disagree, but I didn't
> spend very much time reading for this attempt.
>
> Fifth attempt was October 4/5 in RTP. Managed to finish day 1 work
> pretty early and review my work. Poked around on the CD trying to figure
> out a way to implement something that just didn't seem to want to work
> right. Nearly killed my chance by making a simple cut and paste error on
> an access list on day 1 that cost me a nice chunk of cushion. Made up
> for it with a very clean day 2! At this point I had the privilege of
> walking around Cisco's campus for an hour and a half while Alan set up
> troubleshooting. I think that may have been the toughest part of the
> test. If the pressure wasn't intense enough just being on my fifth
> attempt and wondering how I would tell my wife if it didn't work out, it
> was doubled as I imagined all the horrors lurking in the rack waiting to
> deny me my goal. Fortunately I never had to figure out how to tell her
> :-)
>
> When Alan asked me if I had a CCO account I could physically feel
> the pressure lifting. And when he handed me the much-coveted sticky note
> it took a lot of restraint not to hoot and holler. All the way down I-40
> I kept waiting to wake up and discover that it was only Wednesday
> morning and I hadn't done a thing yet. Now I'm hoping to rediscover my
> family and find out what I used to do before starting down the road to
> CCIE.
>
> The things that I feel made the difference for me in this last
> attempt might seem a bit counter-intuitive. I actually spent less time
> on my home lab, just enough to remain sharp on the non-IP material while
> I kept my IP skills honed at work. I felt much less stressed and found
> that I was retaining material better. The harder and faster I tried to
> cram knowledge in, it seemed, the more got pushed out. By breaking up my
> studying with painting the house (a logical follow-up to the replacement
> of wood siding which was my diversion while prepping for the CCIE Design
> written exam) I maintained a sense of balance/calm that I lacked in my
> earlier attempts. Until I was waiting for troubleshooting I didn't feel
> anywhere as nervous as I had before and my consumption of Rolaids was
> greatly reduced :-)
>
> Some notes and observations:
>
> DON'T EAT THE FREE LUNCH! I'm pretty sure that just nibbling on an
> apple and picking at a salad had a favorable effect on my performance. I
> was still wired in the afternoons instead of comfortable and sluggish.
>
> I didn't take any prep courses or use any online labs. I gave
> serious consideration to getting the Bootcamp labs but relied instead on
> making sure that I could configure each of the things I had missed in my
> previous attempts without resorting to the CD.
>
> The following bears repeating: Read the posts to the groupstudy
> lists and try to figure out answers on your own. Read the posts to the
> groupstudy lists and try to figure out answers on your own. Read the
> posts to the groupstudy lists and try to figure out answers on your own.
>
> Much deserved thanks first to my wife and kids for putting up with big
> electric bills and little quality time. Thanks to some of the folks at
> SBC Datacomm for constant encouragement and professional challenges.
> Thanks to Bert Kellerman for swapping lab dates with me (See I didn't
> waste the opportunity man!). Thanks to Paul B. for the time and effort
> of maintaining this list. And thanks to everyone else I am negligent in
> not mentioning already :-)
>
> Neil Rosenthal
> CCIE #6274
>
> --
> Some of my best information on tuning EIGRP came from colleagues,
> both native and US military, in the former Yugoslavia. They pointed
> out how to tune around error rates caused by gunfire hitting the
> telephone lines.
>
> - Howard Berkowitz on Groupstudy 3/13/2000
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Thu Jun 13 2002 - 08:25:26 GMT-3