From: Darby Weaver (darbyweaver@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon May 14 2007 - 16:37:52 ART
Congrats on the new addition to the family...
And to the digits in the family...
Hmmm...
Well-done!!!
Darby
--- jk.ccie@gmail.com wrote:
> First time poster, long time reader...
>
> The past 2 weeks have been pretty crazy. I was
> scheduled to take my first attempt at RTP on May 7.
> On May 2 my wife went into labor almost a month
> early and threw a wrench into my final week "study
> and rest" plan (I'll be grounding my son in a couple
> years for that one ;)
>
> My son (first one) was born healthy and my wife was
> kind enough to let me get full nights sleep before I
> flew out for RTP on May 6. I slept great the night
> before the lab and went in Monday morning actually
> feeling pretty awake and ready. I got the lab, read
> through it, and knew I had a pretty good shot at
> passing.
>
> By lunch (11:15) I was finished with everything but
> multicast (my arch nemesis). I finished that up at
> noon and then had the rest of the day to double and
> triple check everything. That was definitely a huge
> help b/c I found numerous errors that would have
> cost me major points. In almost every case, the
> mistakes were due to me misinterpreting the
> question. It's funny, I was so intent and focused
> on reading the questions multiple times to make sure
> I understood them yet I still made so many silly
> mistakes. I guess I should have read them 4 times
> each <sigh>.
>
> After correcting my mistakes and then going over
> everything one final time, I added up my points into
> four categories - Definite, Probably, Not sure,
> Definitely Not. I left feeling pretty confident
> since I had 83 points in the "Definite" category,
> and only 3 points in the "Definitely Not". But I've
> read countless posts from people who left thinking
> they nailed it only to find out later they failed.
> So, I got back to the hotel and spent the next 8
> hours hitting refresh on my email until I finally
> got what I was waiting for. And I must say I'm
> really glad I passed on the first attempt. Studying
> with a newborn is more difficult than I anticipated
> ;)
>
> Every time I would read one of these emails my
> biggest question was "how did they prepare" so
> here's my list of things that prepared me...
>
> 1. 10 years R & S experience. I'm sure you can
> pass this lab by spending lots of time in a lab
> w/out real world experience, but I found my years of
> working on Cisco equipment to be quite invaluable.
>
> 2. Really fast typing. I would say this is a much
> underrated skill. I've always been pretty quick at
> typing, but I really put focused effort during my
> studies to type out tasks as quickly as possible.
> This certainly helped as I was able to finish the
> lab in just over 4 hours.
>
> 3. Lots and lots and lots of lab time. I was very
> fortunate that my work purchased a full rack of
> routers / switches that allowed me to use vendor
> workbooks. I had a 4 month stretch of downtime at
> work where I was able to spend 4-5 hours a day
> studying. After that dry stretch ended I would
> still study for an hour at work, and every night for
> 3-4 hours. This went on for 8 months. All in all,
> I would estimate I spent close to 800 hours
> studying...fun times ;)
>
> 4. Vendor workbooks. I used the big 3 to study for
> this - Internetwork Expert, IPExpert, and NMC. All
> three get a big thanks from me. I can honestly say
> that any of these would work well for you.
> Ineternetwork Expert and NMC have *amazing* walk
> throughs (which make them well worth the purchase)
> and they are investment protected which is huge.
> IPExpert's first 20 labs are technology focused that
> were a huge help to me starting off, and Scott was a
> huge help to me in answering all my questions (and
> freaking me out w/ the difficulty in labs 39 and
> 40....dear God those sucked ;) As has been said
> many many times before, all 3 have their strengths
> and weaknesses. Do your research, download each of
> their freebie labs, and see what fits you best.
>
> 5. Doc CD. This truly can't be stressed enough.
> With every practice lab I did, anything I was
> stumped on I looked up on the CD. It was often
> tempting to take shortcuts and use cisco.com,
> Google, or Doyle, but the initial pains of
> navigating the CD paid off huge in the end. I got
> two 3 pointers on the lab that I had never attempted
> in any of my labs, yet I was able to figure them out
> b/c of all the months I had spent on the Doc CD.
>
> The lab is definitely passable. Don't take
> shortcuts. When you go through the labs, stop and
> research what you don't understand (this is huge).
> When you take the actual lab the wording and
> physical layout will look different than the
> practice labs, so make sure to truly understand the
> technology.
>
> Best of luck to all
>
> Jay Killion, CCIE #17837
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Fri Jun 01 2007 - 06:55:21 ART