From: Mohamed, Liban [NTK] (Liban.Mohamed@sprint.com)
Date: Mon May 14 2007 - 16:48:37 ART
Jay,
Congrats my friend, well written, I m sure you will spend valuable time with your son. Enjoy you life now
Thanks,
Liban Mohamed
NTAC-IP
Sprint/Nextel
www.sprint.net
404 649-1306 work
404 917-7316 cell phone
-----Original Message-----
From: nobody@groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody@groupstudy.com] On Behalf Of jk.ccie@gmail.com
Sent: Monday, May 14, 2007 3:28 PM
To: ccielab@groupstudy.com
Subject: CCIE #17837
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