7/22/2019 Blog Ine Com 2009-10-18 Optimizing Your Studies

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18 11 CommentsOptimizing Your StudiesPosted by Petr Lapukho v, 4xCCIE/CCDEin CCIE General

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About Petr Lapukhov, 4xCCIE/CCDE:

Petr Lapukhov's c areer in IT begain in 1988 w ith a focus on computer programming, and progressed into netw orking

w ith his first expos ure to Novell NetWare in 1991. Initially involved w ith Kazan State University's campus netw ork

support and UNIX sys tem administration, he w ent through the path of becoming a networking cons ultant, taking part in

many network deployment projects. Petr currently has over 12 y ears of ex perience w orking in the Cisco netw orking

field, and is the only person in the w orld to have obtained four CCIEs in under tw o years, pass ing each on his first

attempt. Petr is an exc eptional case in that he has been w orking with all of the technologies cov ered in his four CCIE

tracks (R&S, Security, SP, and Voice) on a daily basis for many years. When not actively teaching class es, developing

self-paced products, studying for the CCDE Practical & the CCIE Storage Lab Exam, and completing his PhD in Applied

Mathematics.

Find all posts by Petr Lapukhov, 4xCCIE/CCDE| Visit Website

Joshua Walton, CCIE #19763

October 18, 2009 at 10:09 pm

marcin

October 18, 2009 at 11:44 pm

bitje

October 19, 2009 at 12:58 am

Yoruba

October 19, 2009 at 5:59 am

Rizzo

October 19, 2009 at 1:41 pm

TacACK

October 19, 2009 at 5:05 pm

Fabio

October 19, 2009 at 11:45 pm

GC

October 20, 2009 at 2:29 pm

IPv6Freely

October 20, 2009 at 6:09 pm

puneet

October 21, 2009 at 5:59 am

miodragpro

September 26, 2010 at 9:27 am

Many students keep asking us how do I get the most from IEWB-RS VOL1? This product is a Tier-1

solution, designed to teach students the fundamental technologies of the CCIE R&S lab. However, the

workbook looks intimidating to many beginner students due to its huge volume. In short, the problems

that many people have dealing with a large amount of knowledge covered in the workbook could be summarized

as follows:

1. Limited time cant go through all the labs.

2. Memorization issues, tendency to forget things learned earlier.

3. Time planning problems, cannot allocate time properly between the workbook sections to get the most useof it.

Resolving these issues is the best way of improving VOL1 effectiveness. Lets see the ways to address the

outlined issues.

Basic Planning

Start by figuring out how many hours you may spend practicing mini-labs. Normally, this should be around 60-70%

of the total time you have allotted to prepare to the CCIE lab exam. Lets say you have 6 months before your lab

date. Its about 180 days, so you can spend 60%*180=108 days on mini-labs. Now estimate the time you can

spend a day preparing for your CCIE lets say its 2 hours in average (e.g. 1 hour today, 3 hours tomorrow, or

just 2 hours every day). Take a realistic number, accounting for the time you need to spend on your job, family,

etc. Now find the resulting amount of hours that you may spend on VOL1: 108*2=216 hours. Finally, gauge the

time you need to complete a single VOL1 lab. Some of VOL1 labs might be harder than another, so try figuring an

average number. Lets say its about 40 minutes, where 30 minutes you spend actually working on the lab and 10

minutes repeating the information you have just learned. Based on the total amount of hours you have for VOL1

and the average time per lab you may find the approximate number of mini-labs that you may cover; using the

example from above, its going to be 216/(4/6)=324. This number is significantly lower than the amount of

scenarios in VOL1. So how should you divide your efforts among different sections of VOL1 to obtain maximum

efficiency?

Allocating the time between VOL1 sections properly

In the previous blog post, an approach based on the utility function has been suggested. However, after some

modeling I decided to revert back to a simpler approach, based on the concept of max min fairness. The reason is

a well-known utilitarian paradox, which I yet need to address properly

So what about this max-min fairness thing? You may already have known of it, if you studied QoS and resource

sharing. In fact, this is an approach used to implement Fair Queueing maximizing the throughput for the

minimally demanding flow. In our scenario, a flow is a section, and demand is the amount of tasks you need to

complete from this section. We implement section weighting, so that some topics are considered more important as

another. In short, here is how the max/min fair approach works:

1. Assume there are N sections, with the weights a1, a2, aN and the amount of tasks T1,,TN in respectivesections.

2. Suppose you may only complete M tasks, where M < T1+T2+TN.

3. Initially, we allocate the time between sections based on the formula: Xj=aj/(a1+a2+aN)*M. This meansthat every section gets fair amount of resource, proportional to its weight.

4. For every section tha t gets more than it needs, i.e. Xj > Tj, take the amount Xj-Tj and allocate is based onthe weights a1, a2aN as in step (2) among all remaining sections that still need the resource.

5. Repeat the loop to (4) checking for the sections that got more than they needed and re-allocating this

amount again.

This iterative algorithm could be quickly implemented using an Excel spreadsheet. Here is a simple spreadsheet

with some of thebasic constants (e.g. number of tasks per section) configured for you. All you need to enter is the

following:

a) Total amount of hours you are going to spend on the workbook

b) Average amount of time per lab. This may change with your progress, so you may want to get back to the

spreadsheet and edit some values.

c) The number of labs that you have already completed for every section. Like with (b), you may return to the

spreadsheet and re-calculate the time allocation. Make sure you set these to zeroes if you truly dont know much

about the technologies covered in the respective section.

Notice that the spreadsheet only performs two iterations of the weighted fair sharing algorithm, which should be

enough in most cases, but may yield slightly inaccurate results in some situations. Also, pay attention to the

Weights column. This is where you specify the relative importance of every section. In short, the idea is to

prefer the core topics to non-core, thus allocating more time to spend on those. If you feel like you know what

youre doing, you may play with the weights. Just keep in minds that only their relative values do matter, i.e. 10 2030 would yield the same weighting as 1:2:3.

Not just Learning, but Memorizing

Weve been talking about memorization before in this blog post. One answer to better memorization was the

process of optimally spaced repetitions. But those might look complicated if you follow any of the special

algorithms. Is there a small and simple set of instructions that one can follow to improve the memorization process

without the need of any software? In fact, there is. Here are the rules:

1. Perform the first repetition immediately after you finished a set of mini-labs. What do we mean by arepetition? Typically, its a condensed review of the material you have just been working with. Read overthe breakdowns; re-type the major commands in the notepad. Do not spend too much time reviewing andrepeating, it should be kept up to 10% of the time you typically spend labbing up the scenarios. (e.g. if youspend 30 minutes on a mini-lab, allocate approximately 10 minutes to a single lab repetition).

2. Take a 20 minutes break from studying; you may spend the break reading over and analyzing thetomorrows set of mini-labs, or just taking a cup of coffee or green tea. Both drinks contain caffeine, which

in small amounts improve concentration and memorization processes.

3. When you done with the labs for the day, schedule another repetition 8 hours after your initial repetition.Based on this 8-hour interval, it may be best to practice in the morning (so you may take a repetition in theevening) or in the evening, right before you go to sleep (so you may repeat everything early next morning).During that repetition, review the material for all mini-labs you practiced today. For example if you weredoing 3 mini-labs it may take about 30 minutes to perform complete review.

4. Schedule the last repetition of the todays labst by 24 hours in the future counting from the initial (Step 1)repetition (e.g. tomorrows morning if you were practicing in the morning). Mark this on your calendar orany personal time-management tool. This is going to be the last review for the series of the mini-labs youhave done today. Again, it should take no longer than 10-15% of the time you spend practicing thescenarios initially.

This repetition procedure adds over 30% overhead to your bare study time (you need to repeat the material 3

times during the first day). This is a significant increase in time, and you may want to account for it when

calculating the average time to complete a single mini-lab and planning your time budget as shown previously.

How do I prioritize labs within VOL1 sections?

Like we said before, sections are weighted based on their relative importance. Core topics require more attention

than non-core. What about the tasks within a single section? Typically, the workflow for VOL1 is linear: every next

lab requires previous scenarios as pre-configuration; however, major chains are independent, and you may

see the workbook asking you to perform configuration resets between the sub-sections. Commonly, more

advanced scenarios follow the basic ones, so you progress naturally by doing them in sequence. However, in

situations when you dont have enough time, you may want to focus on the scenarios you are most unfamiliar with

and skip some basic stuff.

In addition to this, some sections, especially the non-core ones (e.g. QoS or IP Services), may not follow the linear

logical structure perfectly. For example, if you take IP Services you may see scenarios being grouped by

technology: e.g. DHCP, NAT, WCCP and so on. For the QoS, you may groupscenarios in sub-sections such as

MQC, Catalyst QoS, Legacy FRTS and so on. In this case, you may want to apply the same fair scheduling logic to

these sections. In the same XLS file we referred to before, there is an additional sheet (named QoS) to help you

splitting the time inside a large, non-linear section. Im planning to add similar breakdowns to other non-linear

sections, such as IP Services, System Management and Security. Here is a sample screenshot of this page:

It works in the same way as the main planning page. However, you dont have to edit the total amount of labs for

the QoS section it is copied from the previous sheet. You may only want to edit the Labs Completed column, to

reflect the amount of scenarios you came through already.

Summary

The above-described techniques should help you get more organized and proactive with your time management

as well as improve content retention. Keep in mind those are just tools, and its up to you to do all work! And staytuned for more updates to the XLS file and the methodology. Following our Tier-based logical approach, the next

step after VOL1 should be IEWB-RS VOL2 full-scale labs practicing, which is to be covered next.

Tags: ccie, ccie prepartion, ccie studies, iewb-rs vol1, memorizing, time planning, v5

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11 Responses to Optimizing Your Studies

Thanks a lot for the fantastic break down, Petr. I now have a strategy I can use to keep me focused and on schedule. )

Reply

Hello Petr,

Could s omeone p rovide this material for Security?

Reply

cool, thanks

Reply

Thanks Petr great for learning strategy and planning.

Reply

Petr,

Very nice po st. You are Wizard

Can you please provide similar plan or advice for Security Track? Most of us are u n-sure about Sec-Vol-1, whereas we heard Keith

Barker will be enhan cing Security Vol1 and new Audio Boot Camp CD.

Thanks

Reply

Great breakdown!

Anything si mil ar for CCIE-sec plann ed?

Crossed fingers =)

Reply

Dear Petr, good post !

Can you ,please, provide the manual p rocedure to calculate this number ? i have tried to use the Xj=aj/(a1+a2+aN)*M but i dont

understand .

thanks

Reply

Hi,

I noticed on the CCIE RS v4.0 blueprint, theres no PVLAN topic. As for practice, since theres no pvlan involved, can I use just

4x3550s then?

I appreciate any comments or feedback.!

-Aspiring CCIe

Reply

GC: PVLANs arent the only difference between the switches. Check the INE resources page for a full l ist of differences one of the

biggest being QoS.

Reply

Its a great post. In my opinion, as long as everyday you learn something new or scratched some thing that u were not aware

existed, I think you are going in the right direction and s hould be s atisfied with it. I agree time is of major iss ue. However, I would

say doing the Vol1 (like Petr said) repeatedly will help the transition to Vol2 (you will not get stuck n may be find so me is sues with the

lab solution s ince your basics are clear)I have done Vol1 6 times n now I can jus t open the PDF and just read rather than go for the

racks/simulation.

Reply

I will us e your recommendation for my mas tering of route exam,thanks a lot Petr

Reply

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