From: Scott Morris (smorris@ipexpert.com)
Date: Mon May 14 2007 - 16:58:31 ART
Congratulations on both your CCIE and your son!!! Now one is done, relax
and go spend time with the other! You'll have those sleepless nights that
used to be caused by the CCIE studies now going on for another reason!
Well done!
Scott Morris, CCIE4 (R&S/ISP-Dial/Security/Service Provider) #4713, JNCIE
#153, CISSP, et al.
CCSI/JNCI-M/JNCI-J
IPexpert VP - Curriculum Development
IPexpert Sr. Technical Instructor
smorris@ipexpert.com
http://www.ipexpert.com
-----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
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