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Like the title says, I have slain the BSCI dragon.

That was no easy beast to slay. I made my first attempt back in the beginning of February, after a month of hardcore studying. I was close. Very close. My theory was solid. But when it came to applying those in the simulations especially, that was when the BSCI bared its teeth. I wasn’t prepared for the number of simulations and simlets on the exam, nor was I ready for the sheer depth I was expected to know the information.

I won’t make that mistake again. Maybe someone can become a CCNP without more than a little lab time, but I’m not that person. You need lab time, either with a simulator like gns3, your own network rack, or by renting a rack for a few hours and working remotely. I used gns3 myself, and it was invaluable in my in-depth reviewing this past month.

Two months, thousands of pages of reading, hundreds of study questions and practice exam questions, and a dozen or so labs later, I passed the BSCI this morning with flying colors. It was a battle hard-fought, and the rewards will be sweet. The BSCI is largely considered the hardest of the Cisco exams, although the new TSHOOT exam may give me a run for my money (if I don’t take the ONT and ISCW before 31 July, of course).

A short overview of the study materials I used, in no particular order:

• Building Scalable Cisco Internetworks (BSCI) Authorized Self-Study Guide, 3rd Ed.
• Building Scalable Cisco Internetworks (BSCI) Official Exam Guide, 4th Ed.
• Cisco Learning Network
• Cisco Bible
• Packet Life

Next stop, BCMSN. See you there!

The past month has been full of work, and severely lacking in spare time. That’s what I get for starting a blog with a month or so to go until finals! Well, the grades are in, and I live to learn another day.

But, more importantly, I am officially CCNA® as of this morning. I could have done it faster, and certainly better, but I’m happy with how that part of the semester went. Next semester will be studying for the four CCNP exams as an officially-sanctioned independent study. While this is not a Cisco Certification blog, I will be posting the study materials I come up with for myself and reviewing the commercially- and freely-available tools I use. There are lots of excellent tutorials, sample labs, and other study materials out there on the net, but that just means there’s more junk to sift through!

Other academic doings for spring include my capstone course and finishing my requirements up for both computer science and mathematics. I will also be tutoring CS170, Fundamentals of Computer Organization, for Old Dominion University’s Computer Science department. To see this semester’s work leading up to the capstone course, please visit the CS410 Green Team page.