Today I successfully passed the exam. I got a score of 420. Alhamdulillah.
How I studied for the exam: I watched the Vmware E-learning fundamental videos, took notes, reviewed them with a big mind map, then registered and sat for it. I sat studying in many small sessions.
It’s great to sit for an exam and pass it from home :) it’s also great to see there are other folks out there who are sharing the same experience.
Studying for Cisco certifications not enough with only official Cisco Press books. We got to supplement our reading with other documents. for CIP1 exam, I decided to heavily rely on reading from the screen. Why? because a network engineer does not often have the luxury to print all the documents he works with.
Documents I’m reading to supplement my CIPT1 studies:
For example, let’s take Call Survivability. In the Student Guide, it says that call survivability is maintaining the RTP stream between two IP endpoints when the CUCM fails. However, the foundation Guide and I agree that call survivability involves TDM-to-IP-calls too.
Another exemple: does MGCP support call survivability? the Student Guide says no. Maybe it was supported in a later release, you’ll probably say. Read the following line: “Media Gateway Control Protocol has supported call survivability (call preservation) since it was introduced on the gateway routers, but H.323 gateways did not support this feature until Cisco IOS 12.4(9T)”.
Finally, I passed. I feel so happy that two years of discontinuous study and a lot of frustration paid off. I deserve this nice recognition :)
Now, I can tell that it takes a LOT of patience, focus and self confident to pass not only this exam, but the whole track. Why? because many guys fall in the trap of cramming questions in order to become CCNP fast.
I began the CCNP journey in 2009. I only became CCNP in 2011!
Some guys may tell me that I was not serious about my studies. But here are my arguments:
Two days are left before my TSHOOT exam. I feel confident about it since I have a first taste of it. I read feedback given by test takers that it is a a nice experience. I ought to be ready for both scenarios. If I succeed, then I know that all my limiting beliefs about CCNP were false. Then, I’ll know that I was prisoner of my false beliefs. And if I fail, then I should remind myself about all the courageous people in the IT world who spent a lot of money and time in the pursuit of their certs. Either way, I’ll learn something, and that’s my own choice. I made my choice to enhance my career, no matter what the sacrifices are. “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear” - Mark Twain
I gathered these notes to mentally prepare my Troubleshooting methodology on the exam day:
This is a collection of possible troubleshooting tips I collected over my studies. They are organized by OSI layer:
Score is 822. Passing score was 790. It came after four days of reviewing IPv6, Route maps, BGP,… In the beginning of the test I was taking enough time to read and answer the questions. However I lost much time in my first lab simulation. The scenarion wasn’t clear to me. And each time I had to click on the console button to reach a router. And I was not seeing changes in the routing table so it confused me a lot. I began to worry about my score. And I got my second lab simulation. And immediately after, the third. I told to myself: “man, what did I do to Cisco to treat me this way?” So I had almost 38 minutes to do the third lab sim and 32 questions ! Besides, the test supervisor was tearing papers on her desk. And the other guy in the room was complaining about the bug in his exam. I was going to scream. At the end, I was almost flipping through the questions. I finished the test. The test supervisor told me “congratulations!”.