From: Norma Schutt (nschutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Date: Thu Aug 23 2001 - 04:14:41 GMT-3
Ok, my turn, my turn.
I passed today in San Jose on my second attempt. It's strange. I keep
thinking I'm going to wake up in the morning and find out this is only a
dream. I think I'm the first female CCIE employed by Schlumberger. I'll
find out later when I get back to work.
There were three people from Day 1 who made it to Day 2 in my group. The
weird thing is that all three of us got our numbers today. That was really
cool.
The only advice I can give to people is to reread your foundational books
such as Doyle and Halabi. I got so much more out of reading those again
the second and third time through. I continued to learn tidbits even
though I thought I already knew most of it. And practice, practice,
practice. Be able to configure this stuff in your sleep because you won't
have time to figure it out then, yada yada yada. You've heard this all before.
Don't ever think you can't do this. It can be done. Two years and nine
months ago I quit my secretarial job because the pay sucked ($27k/yr) to
change careers and go into the IT field. See, I'd heard about this thing
called MCSE that paid about 10 grand more a year as a starting salary than
I was currently making. So, I quit my job and went through the Microsoft
classes and got my first job on a help desk in May, 1999. In August three
months later I got transferred from that help desk position over to the
Cisco-outsourced helpdesk called the "TAC". But, oh gosh, I gotta learn
about something called a router that kinda looked like a VCR. Whatever,
the pay was better and I didn't have to listen to anyone patter on about
not being able to get their mouse to work. But, none of my new co-workers
cared about my shiny new MCSE, all they talked about was this thing called
CCIE, which was something you got after you got your CCNA. Little did I
know at the time where that fork in the road would lead and that I'd
finally found my niche.
Well it was two years ago this month that I first learned what a router was
and how they made a network go. And look at me now. Crying on the
proctor's shoulder this afternoon sobbing "I've got my life back!" I
couldn't stop laughing and crying simultaneously. I'm sure they thought I
was nuts, but, hey, I didn't care. The stress had me a bit crazy here at
the end, anyway. And if anyone doesn't like it, I'm a CCIE and can kick
your butt... :-)
So, that's about it.
Norma
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Schlumberger/Network Solutions
Norma Schutt, CCIE 8063
WAN Element Manager - Cisco
5599 San Felipe #400
Houston, TX 77056
Office: (713) 513-3253
Fax: (713) 513-3150
Helpdesk 24x7: (713) 513-3180
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