Oluwatosin Popoola, CCIE #26230

Hello everyone? I passed the R&S v4.0 lab on June 16 2010 in Lagos, Nigeria (Mobile lab). I thank the Almighty God, my parents, siblings and friends for their support. This is really special to me because it was my first attempt and I really feel great about that. I will like to thank the INE team for all their training materials (INE WBs Vol 1,2 and 4 in particular) as they were really helpful. MY EXPERIENCE The lab started at about 8.15am with the Troubleshooting section. For the first 10mins, I couldn?t imagine I was already doing the exam. I was nervous at the beginning but I got over that after some time. I had some problem with the first question and that threw me off balance. I immediately remembered my plan of not spending much time on a question, so I left that question and went to the next one. I was able to answer that and I regained my confidence . I went on to answer the others, made sure the problems in each question were solved and then saved the configuration. By the time I was done with the last question, I had 1 minute more. I couldn?t go back to the first question I had issues with. I wasn?t bothered because I was pretty confident of the rest I did even though I didn?t have time to go back and crosscheck. So, 2hrs gone and time to go to the main configuration section. I wasn?t too happy that I wasn?t able to save some time from the tshoot for the main configuration lab, but I was satisfied that I did that section quite well. I started the configuration section pretty well. I spent about 1hr 15mins on my layer 2. Everything seemed to b going on smoothly until I got to some part of my layer 3 section where I faced some challenges. I spent over 45 mins trying to get my way around it but couldn?t. At this time, I was almost getting frustrated but quickly regained composure to move on to some other tasks. I searched for tasks I was very sure of and could give me sure points without even thinking of what to do. I was able to finish this within 1hr 30mins. Then, I went to tasks that I didn?t know completely and started thinking of the right thing to do. By the time I finished, it was about 4.15pm and had barely 15mins to verify. At this point I didn?t even know what to do. I went through all d questions and calculated all d points I was very sure of provided there wasn?t any mistake. This amounted to 74. All I could do was hope that some of the others I was 90% sure of was right so that I could hit the 80 mark?and at the same time hope that there was no mistakes in d so called sure questions. I left the lab location that day believing I had a chance of passing provided everything worked out positively. The next day, I was scared to check the result but gathered some courage only to see my score report indicating a pass with my CCIE number (26230). I shouted for joy and was so excited that a heavy burden was off my neck.