ROUTE - Epic Win!

Woohoo!  I passed the ROUTE test this morning.  That means I’m done with the CCNP track!  🙂

If you remember, I took it over a week ago and had some bad luck on it.  Alright, bad luck is the wrong phrase.  I didn’t study enough and failed it.  This time, though, I had a special weapon on my side – the ROUTE Foundations book.  I haven’t used the Foundations books before, but, I saw some tweets about this one, so I picked it up off of Safari.  In just a couple pages, I realized that I was reading the answers to several questions directly out of the book.  It was amazing.  I only studied my weak points and wound up with 144 more points than I did last time.  I can’t say that was entirely because of the book, but I must say it was a big reason.

The test, like last time, was actually really good.  The questions were well-written and clear for the most part.  There were, of course, some that were confusing, but there weren’t any traps like you usually see in the other tests.  A couple asked you to do contradictory things.  There were a couple that just blasted you with information, but, if you read the question and know the material, the answer just pops right out at you.  Overall, another great test.  That makes 2 I’ve taken…and they’re both the 642-902.  🙂

I’m quite excited about finishing up.  I’ve had a lot of failures along the way, but the support from the online community has been tremendous.  Thanks to everyone who kept pushing me and telling me I could do it.  I’m also happy to report that I kept the testing costs below the cost of the CCIE lab (barely) and that I may hold the record for number of P-level tests (8 P-levels tests and 10 overall) and overall Cisco test questions answered (535 questions).  What an honor.  *denotes sarcasm*

So, what’s next?  I think I’m going to take a month or two off from networking to study up for a ham radio license.  We get a lot of hurricanes down here, and having a good radio around will help us and the community out if such a disaster happens.  I’m calling it prep for CCIE-Wireless.  Heh.  When I get done with that, I either plan on hitting up the CCIE-R&S or going down the CCDP track.  I’m not really sure, but we’ll see when we get there.

Don’t worry.  The blog will stay network-related.  With the feedback from the study questions format, I think I’ll start a problem question and answer format.  I’m also thinking of generating scenarios to work through.  Again, we’ll see when we get there.

Send any trips to Delaware questions my way.

Audio Commentary:
[audio:/content/images/wordpress/2010/07/ROUTE-Epic-Win.mp3|titles=ROUTE – Epic Win]