CCIE Candidate

So since a couple of people have asked, I guess not everyone is reading the groupstudy mailing list. I passed the lab on my first shot last Thursday. It was just like everyone warned me it would be - tough, but fair. Also it was more straight-forward than most of the vendor labs, but that may be because they don’t want people to bug the proctors too much. The proctors were nice enough, one got grouchy with me so I switched to the other one (I tried to load-balance between the two but one didn’t show up until later).

Since I wrote a long-ass email to groupstudy, I’ll just cover what I think is newer ground - the few days before the test, and the few days since. A brief intro regarding the last month is in order too.

The last month

Leading up to the test I was fortunate enough to have a class about 7 weeks before my exam, and have a manager who understood the gravity of the situation and let me study for the last three weeks. On the other hand, studying full-time is actually much harder than working if you’re taking seriously, and I don’t think I’ve ever pushed it out like that in my life.

Since I’d worked through every technology individually via IE Volume 1 and Narbik’s material, I just needed about a month to pull it all together via labs. I finished the four IE Volume 2 labs, repeated two of the ones I had done previously, did both Cisco Mock Labs, and did the first seven of the IE Volume 3 labs. I was actually failing the labs most of the time. The Cisco ones I got creamed on, something like 46% and 52%. But I was nailing down my methodology and the remaining technology. The individual technology breakdowns are my preferred method of learning, but they don’t cover redistribution. So I needed work on that, and IE Volume 3 stepped up and tossed a few beatdowns on me there.

Just as important was the methodology. I drilled and drilled and drilled, until by the last 4-5 days I felt that if I had the opportunity to move my test up I could have done pretty much the same. By “methodology” I mean specifically:

• Set up environment - windows (I do 10 side-by-side SSH sessions at home, same software as lab)
• Write out diagram - basic shapes, lines, IPs, VLANS, masks. I found that I could take a lot of shortcuts, like not recording masks if they were /24s, not writing out the VLAN number if it was the same as the 3rd octet, etcetera. These shortcuts saved a couple minutes, nothing magnificent, but they were only not confusing because I drilled them over and over
• Lab read-through with diagram update - draw out IGPs/BGP, make little notes
• Draw four circles representing the switches, make L1/L2 notes and representations
• Apply my aliases, do a show run and look at the output for general feel for what’s going on

All of this typically took me about 45 minutes, so when I got into the exam and hadn’t touched the keyboard almost an hour into the exam, I wasn’t panicked or upset. It was just another day in the lab.

Worth mentioning is sleeping pills. I used Unisom to sleep the night before the exam. It’s over the counter, and I took a couple (one at a time) a few times in the preceding weeks and made sure that if I took one at 8pm, I could perform at 8am the next day. Don’t go into the lab tired, but don’t leave that kind of thing to chance. I actually still had a little trouble sleeping, but managed to sock away about 6 hours.

The home stretch

I think the last week was the hardest. I had finished my preparations, but still felt compelled to cram and pound through everything possible. What if I stopped cramming too soon and missed that one little piece of the puzzle that would have allowed me to pass? That’s a crappy way to think; it’s illogical and counter-productive. You don’t pass or fail based on the last week of study, you pass or fail based on the previous 6+ months. As I said in an earlier post, fights are won in the gym. And not in the gym two days before go time.

So some advice and tips regarding the few weeks and days before the exam, which are increasingly stressful.

• Work your ass off in the last few weeks. This is the time to push it out. Every day and/or night you tell yourself you “deserve” some time off is another percentage chance of you having to repeat the process. I ended most days feeling like my head was in a vice, and only took half days off when I was about to scream and cry and headbutt something made of glass.
• Stop killing yourself in the last week. Back it off. Don’t stop, but don’t keep filling 10-12 hours every day with intense lab time. I stopped doing labs on Saturday, and my test was Thursday. Sunday through Tuesday I did increasingly light review of my notes and material.
  • I went through all of Narbik’s books and highlighted the questions and the answers, and configured a couple of things that were still not comfortably easy, like conditional BGP advertisements
  • I went through all of my notes, all of my own blog entries and those of other people
  • My co-worker gave me about 10 pages of his notes and I went through them. At this point I was more trying to remind myself of all of the things that I had previously learned and forgotten, particularly the things that I felt were noteworthy enough to write down
• I made sure to spend less time each day doing this. It’s hard for some people (like me…) to recognize when doing less is worth more. As I discussed in a groupstudy post, athletes typically take a week off before competitions, just doing light workouts and letting their bodies recover and heal. Not only do you avoid last-minute injuries (analogous to us taking a hit to our morale or confusing ourselves on something we were just fine with), you gain back your energy and inner fire

The last two days

These are the most and least stressful. On one hand you aren’t under the gun pounding on labs, on the other hand you have this incredible weight just sitting on your chest. The idea is to forget entirely about anything CCIE-related unless you’re actually studying or doing some of the logistics around it (paying, making travel arrangements, etcetera). Every now and then you remember that you’re about to test and you heart thuds, but that’s fine, just start thinking about other things again.

• Hoard and consume mediocre art. When I read a great book or see an insightful movie, it sticks. I’ll sit there thinking about it, sometimes up to a week later. This is the wrong time for that. I watched movies to escape the reality of my situation - to avoid stewing on my impending test, which would not have accomplished anything beyond stress stomach aches. My masterpieces included:
  • Blade
  • John Carpenter’s Vampires
  • Way of the Gun
  • Iron Man
  • Note that none of these are particularly good. Entertaining yes, but not thought-provoking. That’s perfect. I needed something good enough to distract me for two hours, but not good enough to do so the next day. I also read some of my cheesy paperbacks, avoiding the ones I knew were really good

My attitude changed a couple of days before the exam too, and it actually helped. I got pissed. Here I was killing myself for over six months, and I put in over a year of total study time, culminating in three weeks of what amounted to a self-driven boot camp.

And I’m nervous?

F*&^ this lab! That’s right, right where it hurts. I decided that if the lab exam was a person I was going to do the equivalent of knocking its damned teeth into its face. The lab should be afraid of ME. Punk ass lab.

This helped tremendously, although your mileage may vary. When I’m scared of something I find the most effective tactic is often to blitz and attack it, which is how I got into computers in the first place. Since my really stressful past experiences revolved around fights, I just treated this like an opponent. I had done my job preparing, now I just had to go do my job in the ring/on the mat. There’s always the chance for a lucky punch, but I prepared thoroughly enough that I didn’t care. If I catch a KO shot on the jaw, I’m coming back, and back, and back again. That punk lab can’t get lucky over and over, and when that luck runs out and I get ahold of it, it’s a choke time.

So my overly aggressive, testosterone-driven fantasies of violence against a fictitious being named “lab” actually worked. I relaxed, up to and including the moment I walked in and sat down to start the exam.

The wait

At 3pm I had finished everything but about 3-4 skipped tasks. I stopped working on those, rebooted the whole lab while grabbing a chocolate break, then verified everything. Word for word verification. I caught two really dumb mistakes and fixed them, asked a couple of questions, tweaked a couple of things, and felt comfortable at the end that everything was as right as I was going to get it. Then I went after the skipped tasks. After finishing all of that I had another 30 minutes to fart around, so I re-verified things like neighbors, route tables, etcetera. I walked out of there cautiously optimistic, thinking I had passed, but knowing that the steps to CCIE status were littered with the broken spirits of those who found out they had failed and had no idea why. If I had failed, I would have had no idea why.

So after the exam I headed over to Micro Center nearby (after a pizza and beer) and messed around for hours. The place was pretty much empty so I got to play Call of Duty 4 on a huge LCD for about an hour, blowing off terrorist heads to my blackened heart’s content. The email came in at about 10pm, and I can tell you that hotel wireless was really pissing me off when I couldn’t get the whole CCO page to load (I have about 90% chance of horrid service when I use hotel wireless). After all the prep and psychology, my pulse started to pound and my breathing felt shallow and fast. I thought that passing scores were communicated in the email notification and only fails made you log in before giving you the status, but when I finally got in it was there - my new number. Dude … the “PASS” is really small. You get there and you’re all nervous, exhausted from the lab exam, and your eyes are skittering all over; we should petition Cisco to make it triple the size or something.

I triple checked the results, refreshing to make sure it wasn’t some typo that someone noticed and fixed a minute later. Then I called my wife back and we celebrated - me getting my life back, and her getting her husband back, minus all the snappy a-holeness that she’d increasingly dealt with over the last year. Then I started writing apology emails, announcing that I’d climbed the mountain and would start being a real friend/family member again, just give me a month or so to make the initial rounds.

The fun stuff

I played video games Friday. Then again on Saturday. Oh yeah, and on Sunday too. I broke it up by hanging out with my mujercita doing things like eating chocolate crepes and drinking some nice loose-leaf Earl Grey at a relaxed pace. After all, suddenly I had nowhere to be! She wanted a cup of coffee after brunch, and when I waved my hand and said go for it, we’re in no rush, she said she liked the new me a lot better.

I also broke up the gaming by spending about $3,100 on a new gaming rig with a 30″ LCD, an Ubuntu book (so I can run Ubuntu natively and virtualize XP for gaming), and a pair of games.* My current monitor is the best one on the market … the 2000 market. My desktop is from 2002. So I got 8 years out of the monitor, and 6 years out of the computer. At this point my CPU is starting to peg for a few seconds when I open a crowded web page. So not only do I need something new - legitimately need, it’s starting to hurt - but I earned this.

I’ve also had great fun erasing all of the IE Class on Demand classes that I put into mp3 format to listen to in the car.  I’ve erased most of the material like that that I either can’t share or realistically will never look at again.  I brought 7 books into work that were strewn about my den floor, the thinnest one being about 600 pages.  Today I brought Narbik’s books in for reference (I’m already sending the next candidates to him, so if they peek it’s not really a crime), and tomorrow I’ll bring in the IE and Unitek material for recycling at work.  So I’m not only getting my life back, I’m reclaiming real estate.  Just shutting the SSH windows into my lab was fun when I got home Friday morning.  I had actually left them open before leaving for San Jose for the express purpose of savoring the “last closure” in case I passed.  Man, that worked out well.

* The monitor showed up this morning, it’s frickin’ huge. I can’t wait to march the armies of medieval Europe across it.

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