Scheduling the CCIE Lab

killuah72

Hello

I haven't passed my written exam yet but I was just wondering what the average wait time is for an open spot in the R&S Lab? The location doesn't really matter because I would have to fly anyway.

Thanks!

mikej412

It's hard to tell with the holidays without knowning what Lab you'd fly to.....

San Jose has R&S dates open starting with Jan 25th 2011.

RTP has dates starting 21 Feb 2011.

But both of those sites had lots of Oct/Nov/Dec openings when I last checked in October.

Sydney has open dates starting Dec 6th 2010 to Dec 16th 2010 -- then jumps to January 4th 2011

Tokyo has December 6, 7, 8, and 9th open -- and then jumps to 26 January 2011.

Brussels has one opening on Jan 6th, and then pretty much any day Jan 11 2011 on.....

The farthest date I can see on the RTP schedule is August 1st 2011.

You have to pay 90 days before your lab date, so you can either grab a date and sit on it until "pay day" and then decide if you really want that date -- or you can wait until you feel ready and then check out the more current dates available within a month or so (depending on how early you want to make flight plans).

Are you interested in any particular date/site? You can input a location and date and then page through the schedule 5 days at a time, so without looking specifically I wouldn't notice if San Jose was closed for the summer as part of a green initiative.

mikej412

Just paged through the RTP dates and noticed there is only one early April date listed -- then the RTP schedule jumps to May 5th 2011.

Nevermind, someone just jumped on that date, though they may drop it and grab a February or March date if they can get in some consistent lab practice through the rest of December.

Lab Date: 05-Apr-2011
Location: RTP
Lab Type: Routing and Switching
Payment Due Date: 05-Jan-2011

killuah72

I'm looking at taking the written in February or March 2011 and take the lab within 1-2 months and preferably in RTP.

killuah72

Nvm, you already answered my question. Thanks for all the details Mike. I have an idea now of how the scheduling works.

Turgon

how are your studies progressing?

killuah72

It's going pretty good. I'm following the INE plan, interleaving VOL1 and VOL2 core topics. My work is helping me pay for my CCIE training and got me a smack load of tokens. So I pretty much have 5 hours of lab time every day for a while and some study time at work.

MPLS is just being a pain in my neck right now.

Turgon

killuah72 wrote: »

It's going pretty good. I'm following the INE plan, interleaving VOL1 and VOL2 core topics. My work is helping me pay for my CCIE training and got me a smack load of tokens. So I pretty much have 5 hours of lab time every day for a while and some study time at work.

MPLS is just being a pain in my neck right now.

Sounds like work are supportive. This is a big advantage. Spend as much time as you can get away with on works time to study.

reaper81

Sounds like you have everything setup. Damn, your making me look bad with all your hours

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Sounds like you have everything setup. Damn, your making me look bad with all your hours

I wouldn't agree. I think you and killuah72 are ahead of the other bloggers by quite a distance at this time. A lot of CCIE blogs stall never to return which is a shame but the work requirements to complete this thing are very aggressive. You are studying practically every day and that makes all the difference. The trick is not to stop. If you are still at in in one years time keeping the same pace you should be there or there abouts. As for me, I'm studying IP services today. Result.

reaper81

Thanks, words of wisdom. For every day and every hour I tell myself that I'm a bit closer to my goal. Even studying 30 minutes in the evening while it doesn't sound as much is still roughly 100 hours in a year. Have taken your advice to read a chapter and do the questions. I think the Boson test might be a bit harder than the real test but that's only good, then I will come prepared.

Turgon

reaper81 wrote: »

Thanks, words of wisdom. For every day and every hour I tell myself that I'm a bit closer to my goal. Even studying 30 minutes in the evening while it doesn't sound as much is still roughly 100 hours in a year. Have taken your advice to read a chapter and do the questions. I think the Boson test might be a bit harder than the real test but that's only good, then I will come prepared.

A little each day works well. That's why I advocate reading no more than one chapter of Odom each day followed by the end of chapter questions. At that rate you clear the whole book in one calander month. Too many candidates do bad arithmetic regarding available studytime. They assume 3 hours per day and multiply by 365. That's just not sustainable because of life for most people. So they push very hard, burn up and fade away.

Suggest you keep the chapter scores on a whiteboard. Make a table on the whiteboard with the chapter headings listed with a row of boxes against them. Record first score, second and third as you rinse and repeat. Getting the percentages up is a good motivator. For questions wrong print out the solution and put in a ring binder. You should study those solutions as they will straighten your logic out. The same goes for the Boson tests. Expect to spend 50+ hours working practice questions and examining the solutions.

Good luck.

jason_lunde

killuah72 wrote: »

It's going pretty good. I'm following the INE plan, interleaving VOL1 and VOL2 core topics. My work is helping me pay for my CCIE training and got me a smack load of tokens. So I pretty much have 5 hours of lab time every day for a while and some study time at work.

MPLS is just being a pain in my neck right now.

I am going through that INE plan as well, some of the labs are kicking my butt. I am solid on the "core" stuff like IGP, L2, BGP, Multicast, but the other stuff like IP Services are proving to be hell. Where are you at in their program? I am, actually today, doing their WB2 Lab 3. I have been getting in a steady habit of doing the lab, then reviewing it. I walk away after that, and revisit the SG the next day to make notes on the solutions, what I did, and where I screwed up (try to figure out my logic at "why" I approached the task like that.). This has helped my retention a bit, but there is still so much to cover.

killuah72

jason_lunde wrote: »

I am going through that INE plan as well, some of the labs are kicking my butt. I am solid on the "core" stuff like IGP, L2, BGP, Multicast, but the other stuff like IP Services are proving to be hell. Where are you at in their program? I am, actually today, doing their WB2 Lab 3. I have been getting in a steady habit of doing the lab, then reviewing it. I walk away after that, and revisit the SG the next day to make notes on the solutions, what I did, and where I screwed up (try to figure out my logic at "why" I approached the task like that.). This has helped my retention a bit, but there is still so much to cover.

I'm only on my first run of Labs 1-10, learning some interesting stuff here and there. Major thing I really liked is that I'm getting pretty good at creating diagrams especially Layer 2. Used to have problems with endpoints not being able to reach each other but when I got the layer 2 path down on paper, troubleshooting became easier.

killuah72

Another somewhat successful lab session, had some distractions here and there. I finally labbed MST (didn't do it in NP studies) and found that it was really easy and pretty much the same as regular STP on path manipulation. Took down good notes on Backbonefast, LoopGuard, and company. Still need to hammer it down with Cisco Docs because they still confuse me without a book on hand.

Hope to finish up 2010 strong as the holidays will be rough on study time. Family comes first.

Turgon

killuah72 wrote: »

Another somewhat successful lab session, had some distractions here and there. I finally labbed MST (didn't do it in NP studies) and found that it was really easy and pretty much the same as regular STP on path manipulation. Took down good notes on Backbonefast, LoopGuard, and company. Still need to hammer it down with Cisco Docs because they still confuse me without a book on hand.

Hope to finish up 2010 strong as the holidays will be rough on study time. Family comes first.

I would concentrate on Odom and practice test questions now if you havent got the written out of the way yet.