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Blog: My CCIE story….

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I have been waiting to write this post. I am just so deliriously happy right now. Before I start, I want to thank my beautiful wife for her support. She was that voice I heard in my head that told me to just keep going, and never give up when I’d lost hope. I’m glad I listened. :)

The Day Before the exam (6th May 2008):

I got up earlier than my normal routine at around 5am. I wanted to be tired come bedtime so I could get a good nights sleep (This turned out to be a bad idea because, even though I was tired, my mind kept racing and I didn’t sleep much anyway). I try to resist the urge to study. My mind is going through all kinds of different scenarios, and possible solutions.

In the end, I decide to ignore all the advice I had been given on studying on the day before the exam. I figure if I am going to spend the day stressing about scenarios and solutions I might as well make it productive. I don’t want to do any more labs, so I put in IPexpert’s Video on Demand DVD.

This turned out to be a really good idea. The best part about these videos is that they are short, sweet and straight to the point. I have watched the awesome Internetwork Expert Class On Demand a million times and towards the end I got to the point where I knew what commands the Brian’s were going to type in ahead of time. This was great, but the IPexpert videos take a different tack. They covered a wide range of topics in detail but in a very short time (don’t have to wade through 80 hours of video). Exactly what I needed at this stage. My core topics knowledge was already pretty good. The DVD was perfect near the end of my preparations as I just wanted to be exposed to a whole range of stuff quickly that I just need to be aware of. I can look it up on the DocCD if I don’t know how to configure something, but it helps if you are aware of the options. That way when you are thrown curve balls in the exam (and you WILL get curve balls), you have a greater chance of recognizing what they are getting at.

I get through a couple of hours of video in before my taxi arrives to take me to the airport. I stayed at the Vibe Hotel in Alfred Street, North Sydney. This used to be the Duxton hotel (The Sydney location CCIE webpage still has it listed as the Duxton). The hotel is fine. Nothing special but it has a desk, Internet Access and room service. Everything I need at this stage. They have a shuttle that drops you right at the front door of Cisco which is great. I find out that it leaves at 7:15am and I make a booking. At least I know I will be on time.

I shower up, and continue watching the Video On Demand. At around 4pm, I’ve had enough of videos. I need to try and unwind. I put my iPod on and go for a long walk. A good friend of mine suggested that I do some visualization exercises before I do the exam. That is what he did, and he is a double CCIE so I decide to try it. I walk around the streets of Sydney imagining myself doing well in the exam. I imagined myself sitting at the exam calm and focused. I imagine a really hard topic coming up in the exam and visualize myself being calm and handling it perfectly.

This really helped. When I was doing the exam, it was like I had already done it! I had already gone through the stress of the hard questions and so it was like my mind went “Yeah, you’ve already gone through this and you came out okay so don’t panic”. I usually don’t go for that hippie crap but this kinda worked. :)

The Vibe is very close to the harbor so I got to see a magnificent Sydney sunset. I went back to the hotel at around 7pm, ordered dinner and watched a bit of TV.

The Day of the Exam (6th May 2008):

I got up at 5:30am. I didn’t really sleep much. I tossed and turned, and didn’t have longer than 3 hours worth of continuous sleep. I head up at 6:30am to grab a light breakfast and then catch the shuttle to the Sydney offices. It arrives at 7:30am. I am 30 minutes early. This is good!

The Cisco Sydney office is next to St. Leonards train station. There is a Gloria Jeans coffee shop and a Macdonald’s around the corner. I grab a coffee, and just relax. The Cisco website says that reception is open at 8am, but I head up at 7:45am and find that it already open and another candidate is already there. He has 3 (!) CCIE’s and is going for his 4th (voice) today. Another candidate arrives later and he too is going for his R&S. He is pretty nervous, but we chit chat about what we used to prepare etc. Turns out he reads my blog!

The Sydney proctor comes in around 8:15am and jokes that the Lab has moved to Cisco’s Chatswood offices and we will have to hurry to make it. The other two candidates just stare. I’m not sure if they understood the dry Australian humour..or were just too nervous. I laugh. I’m glad he has a sense of humour, its a good sign that he will be approachable.

The proctor turns out to be a great help. I think all up I asked close to 20 questions during the exam. Most of the time his response was to read the question back to me highlighting words specifically and that cleared most things up. Other times he would just look at me and say “you are over thinking it”. One piece of advice he gave was to “Ask a question”. Apparently most candidates just come up and say “I can do it this way or that which one do you want me to do?”. This is not something he can answer directly, so he says to phrase the question where he can answer yes or no and show him you know what you are talking about and not just fishing for answers. Cool, I can understand that.

He takes us for a little tour showing us where we will have lunch and where the toilets are. The Cisco offices look like a cool place to work.

We walk into the lab room. There is a white board on the wall where he marks the time. He goes through the rules, asks us to put our belongings in the corner and asks to check out our watches. Apparently someone brought in a watch with USB capabilities so he checks now. Sneaky!

There is 6 workstations. All flat screen Dells. Two of them are for the Voice Labs. On the desktop there are icons for Calculator, Notepad, Internet Explorer, SecureCRT sessions for each Router and Switch, and a SecureCRT session for the Terminal Server on the desktop. I opt to use the terminal server as this is how I had prepared.

The DocCD works perfectly. Internet Explorer doesn’t allow you to use tabs. We were allowed to save stuff on our desktop but warned not to log out as the desktop is cleared after each session.

You get only two sheets of paper to start with, but you can ask for more. Each sheet has a page number which is recorded, and will be collected after the exam. I spent 50 minutes before I touched the keyboard. I diagrammed a L2 topology, L3 topology, IGP topology, and EGP topology. The Cisco diagrams were good but I wanted to redraw them to get familiar with the topology. I also got a couple of extra sheets of paper and drew three columns on it: Task, Points and Notes.

Lunch is at 12:30pm. I have finished my core and well into the other topics. I am glad I worked on my speed and accuracy. I save and reboot my routers and switches before going to lunch.

So far I have had to look up the DocCD three times for stuff I have never seen before. The wording is especially cryptic in some questions and I read these questions over multiple times, slowly, even write one of them down on one of the sheets of paper and analyze the keywords. After analysis I would go to the proctor and say “This word or phrase here…it could mean they want us to do this or they want us to do this. I just want some clarification on that particular word”. To which he would read it back to me putting emphasis on words around it or read it slowly and asked me questions back to guide me along. I liked his approach. It gave nothing away but at the same time if you knew your stuff made it clear what they wanted.

Lunch is sandwiches. I brought a can of Red Bull with me after some advice from a friend and decide to drink it now for a caffine hit. This works great and I am pumped to go back in.

I finish the exam by 2:30pm. This gave me around 3 hours to check through my answers. I went through each question and verified everything. I tried to prove that everything worked by generating traffic and checking logs. Everything. I found about 5 silly mistakes this way.

After doing the Assessor labs, I got a feel for how the scripts must mark the exams with what verification commands to run. I am so glad I did them and spent a bit of time analyzing them now.

There was one question where I had no idea. I write down three possible interpretations and go to the proctor for clarification but I am still unclear. I decide to do the one with the least possible effect on my topology. I still don’t know if I got this one, but it is the only points I am unsure off. I am pretty sure on the rest, but not 100%. I count my marks. 73 marks I thought “yeah these are definite”. The rest could go either way, depends if my interpretation was correct.

This is probably what annoyed me the most about this experience. It was heavily focused on how you interpreted the question. If you had seen lots of scenarios like I had, you can really see multiple ways of doing things and every word takes on a special meaning. It becomes not just a challenge of your technical ability, but a challenge on your ability to decrypt the meaning in the question. That is where the proctor is invaluable.

If I had to rate the difficulty of the exam it would be about a 7-8 on the Internetwork Expert scale of mock labs. There were somethings that were totally out of left field but were found pretty easily if you know your way around the DOCCD.

The Aftermath:

The exam is finished at 5:11 pm. The proctor informs us that my exam should be marked pretty soon. A proctor from Bangalore will dial in and mark it. I walk out of the Cisco office literally shaking. I am a bundle of nerves. I keep going through the scenario in my head, with ideas of how I could have done this or that differently. Did I ask the right questions? Did I forget to do a no shut on an interface? Did I turn that debug off? I call my wife and let her know I am done. I grab a cab back to the hotel and head back to the airport.

At the airport I head to the Virgin Blue lounge and grab some dinner and have a couple of drinks while I wait the 3 hours for my flight. At around 6:30pm I decide to hop on the net to kill some time and there is an email waiting for me. 6:07pm. That’s what time the email arrived. It had just been over an hour since I left the hotel and my exam was marked already?! My heart was thumping so fast. I had to log in three times because my hands were shaking so bad that I typed in the wrong password. And there it was. I saw my CCIE number through a stream of tears. I did it.

“The more you sweat in training, the less you will bleed in battle”

It’s been a long road over the last year. I have been getting up at 5am, studying for two hours before I went to work, studying till midnight most nights, studying on weekends. It got exhausting. You have to love this stuff to go through that. You have to be passionate about it to the point where even though you are tired, you have the will to try “one more lab” or read “one more chapter”.

“The more you sweat in training, the less you will bleed in battle”. That’s the Navy Seal motto, and I think it is pretty apt for the mindset you need to have to achieve this. Determination. Hard Work. And a love of learning. There will be set backs, but it does not matter how fast or how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.

What Now? I don’t really know yet. Right now all I want to do is stay in this moment. I have a couple of things planned but the next couple of weeks are going to be interesting that’s for sure. Stay tuned!

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© 2007 Arden Packeer. All rights reserved. The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway. This material is not sponsored or endorsed by Cisco Systems, Inc. Cisco, Cisco Systems, CCIE and the CCIE Logo are trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and its affiliates