From: Adam Elghafri (ccie.adam@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Nov 23 2008 - 12:51:53 ARST
Hi group..
here is my success story as Ive promised u
Ive graduated as an electrical engineer in summer 2007 yes.. I am a fresh
graduate with no work experience..
During university, I have completed CCNA and several 400 level courses in
Telecom and networking after graduation, i thought this is not enough, so I
opted for higher degree in Canada.. but unfortunately my immigration
application has been rejected ... I wasn't satisfied with the bachelor
degree I have, plus me loving networking technologies made me take the
decision of studying for CCIE
Of course.. I don't have work experience.. and relying only on self-study is
tough at this stage. .. so I headed to india looking for institutes that
teaches CCNP and CCIEthat was exactly on July 2007 .. I studied there and
in UAE as well as I kept coming and going back and forth the institutes
there are crap .. if I do compare what level of knowledge I got from them
and what I have right now .. its almost 1:15 relied on all books of CCNP
and routing TCP/IP the 2 volumes which are truly THE books of CCIE so here
is my booklist :
- Routing TCP/IP vol I, II, for Jeff Doyle
- CCVP QoS study guide for Odem
- Internet Arch, for Sam Halabi
- TCP/IP illustrated, for Stevens
- MPLS VPN arch
- SNRS book
- DocCD
- O'reailly cisco ios cookbook and cisco ios in a nutshell
- CCNP books
the time where I knew about this group and Internetwork Expert and Dynamips
is almost on Jan/Feb2008started with IE vol 1 and in the last 6 months
(May Oct).. I was truly a caveman (see my facebook photo with the long
hair and bread) studying almost 24/7 with few brakes and a month-end
instead of a week-end for the ppl who are studying now.. my average
productive hours per day was almost 7 hours
During the 6 months I ve mentioned I did the following in order:
-During June, I did IE vol 3 once
-from the first of July, I started with lab 1 of IE vol 2.. the plan was to
finish a lab per day .. or to finish on Jul 20th. !!! .. the first lab went
smooth.. second one was a bit messy.. third took 2 days... and couple of
days later made me realize I need much more time than expected.. I finished
the first round of vol 2 on almost the the end of Aug or 2 months later
Surprisingly enough.. the major factor that made me consume more time is
"BOREDOM". Yes boredom it will start sneaking inside you starting from
lab 7 I still remember lab 18 which I finished in 10 days !!! its not
because of its difficulty.. rather the fact that u don't want to continue
setting on the chair configuring
Ive wrote a post abt this on GS.. went to the cinema.. had fun.. but without
hope.. it was the most dangerous enemy of me that I couldn't defeatmore
dangerous than my classical enemy "memory" as I have below average memory
power. And speaking of difficulties in memorization.. I used to write
notes I wrote and wrote and wrote almost everything I encountered in A4 and
filed all in one folder
This helped me to go back to anything ive ever encountered before and more
importantly, it helped me to understand more clearly !!... yes coz suppose u
ve seen some QoS tech like FRTS.. then u will say: "ya ya I got it".. but in
fact u didn't get the small key point there that won't show up until u drow
it on the paper so taking notes for me was a big factor of my success..
Then I repeated the labs once again.. this time wasn't faster as I expected
coz of the my 2 enemies above mentioned.. plus the holy month of Ramadan
(September) where we muslim fast
I booked a seat on 21 of October I had lots of troubles in adjusting my
biological clock which made me force myself to stay awake the whole 48 hours
before the lab night.. thanks to God I slept good 8 hours before the lab..
When I went out of the lab, I thought I wont make it as I finished on time
without a decent revision! jumped to my laptop and my email pressing
refresh bottom almost every 10 seconds and got the "PASS" at 1:30
am!.needless to say I made everyone around me wake up
Thank you Brain & Brain & Petr from IE thank you Tony for from
cconlinelabs.com.
Hats off to Chris the developer of Dynamips/Dynagen
Thank you GS
Now I feel a bit hopeless in getting a decent job in dubai coz of two major
factors:
- the global financial crisis where most multination companies r having
hiring freeze.
- ZERO years of experience :D
ive started sending my cv everywhere the whole last month and I didn't get a
reply from any company till the writing of this email wish me a good luck!
Adam
CCIE#22416
Blogs and organic groups at http://www.ccie.net
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