The home straight….

Just to recap on the last three days of the bootcamp. We attempted mock lab 3 on Wednesday followed by mock lab 5 on Thursday. Both of these were defiantly harder than the first two as there were quite a number of technology twists that needed to be carefully thought through. I scored 79 and 85 on each of these which I’m pretty happy with.

After the first two labs I knew that the top down approach wasn’t going to cut it for the more difficult ones. It was important to maintain a consistent point average through the lab to avoid getting bogged down on tough questions. If it looked like it was going to take more than 10 minutes, or I didn’t know how to solve it, then it was simply skipped until I felt like going back to it.

This helps with your overall composure during the lab and settles the nerves because you know you’re making progress. Although I haven’t really been nervous up until this point I think it will be important for the big day.

Friday was a review of the two labs followed by some lab strategy, and just generally what to expect on the day.

To sum it up I think the class was worth every penny, it solidified my knowledge in all the core areas and allowed me to do some serious fine tuning of my strategy and configurations. Brian said that he thinks im in good shape to pass, but I’m by no means going to slack off!

This weekend is just rest rest rest and starting Monday I’ll begin the final phase of my study which is focused on staying sharp and recapping on all the technologies. For that i’ll be doing the following:

• Volume I technology labs (for a second time, and any new ones that come out) – In conjunction with looking up each technology in the documentation
• Browsing over all the documentation again
• Volume III Labs 8 -10
• Read through the Volume II labs
• IE mock Lab 6 on Sunday the 2nd November
• IE mock Lab 7 on Saturday the 8th November