High Priority
(All these should start with “For the love of GOD, PLEASE…<do this>)
- Set a date. “Goals are dreams with deadlines”. If you are not in university, and you have command over when you can give the exam, set the date. And I don’t mean in your head, or on paper - call the exam center, or go online and pay up. You have the liberty of postponing ONCE. After that you should just give the exam. Even if you fail, the process of preparing for it during the final days will jack up your discipline levels by force.
- Monitor your progress. Make an excel sheet and upload to google documents. In the excel sheet put in every thing you want to cover as milestones on the left. On the right put in the dates till the day of the test, and beside it the number of days left (reverse countdown). Every morning, blog your results of the previous night and mark it on the excel sheet. This way you are always aware of where you are and how you’re doing. It is also a great way to look back and analyze mistakes in strategy.
- Take your time the first time. Go through each word slowly, understand each concept before moving on to the next. Write down notes as you do, sometimes digested versions of what you read. Understanding something cannot be easily done with topics that are new, hard and more about facts than a logical progression of events or related facts.
- Make Notes. Writing notes saves time in terms of unecessay repeats of learning the same material. Much easier to go through notes too, because you recognize old thought patterns
- Make Flash cards. Most useful for studying Cisco related material because its more about a collection of unrelated facts and figures. Great for jogging memory and forcing recollection of studied items, also for quick, rapid revision sessions. Free flashcards at www.flashcardexchange.com. Please keep in mind, that making them takes a lot longer than reading them so provision a good amount of time for this too.
- Constantly Revise. It’s unbelievable how fast the brain fades the stuff put in. Constant revision makes short term memory items slowly turn into long term memory ones. Remember the graph from Tony Buzan’s “Use your head”?
- Practice. It’s like Confucius said
I hear…I forget
I see…and I remember
I do…and I understand
Fire up the old dynagen / GNS3 (for cisco) and play with the technology. It makes you understand the topic from a whole new angle and makes you more confident to think on your feet about it / to pass the exam.
Medium Priority
(These are not single points of failures like the ones above, but helpful tips)
- Find a quiet place and time and make it routine. What worked for me is getting to work at 6:30 AM and studying for a good 2.5 hours everyday. (acknowledgments for this tip to S DS) If you can wake up earlier, well and good, but it’s hard for me considering I need sleep and I can’t sleep before 10 without disturbing other balances - mostly social and family obligations. Other ones are going to starbucks (try finding deserted ones if you have the transport) or staying up through the hours in the night when everyone sleeps (if you can change your sleep patterns without upsetting energy levels)
