From: Ronnie Angello (ronnie.angello@gmail.com)
Date: Mon May 14 2007 - 16:43:02 ART
Congrats! Enjoy the newborn!
On 5/14/07, jk.ccie@gmail.com <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
>
> _______________________________________________________________________
> Subscription information may be found at:
> http://www.groupstudy.com/list/CCIELab.html
>
-- Ronald Angello CCIE #17846
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