John Crawford, CCIE #15870 (R&S, Security)

Last month, from Ireland I flew to Chicago and spent two weeks at CyscoExpert’s facility in Arlington Heights, IL, USA, and passed CCIE R&S Lab exam the following week (thankfully!) on my first attempt! You could really use CXP at any stage of your preparation as all exercises/lectures are customized for a student. For the two weeks I worked consistently with the same tutor (Bahram) who is absolutely excellent and a very nice guy. He was able to spot the weaknesses I had in topics I actually thought I was good at! On the final day we spent all afternoon just on a whiteboard together with Bahram pushing me one last time on all those weaker topics to a level which to be honest was probably way above what is needed for R&S. I left Chicago believing I could pass. The student:teacher ratio was always 1:1. I never had to wait to get Bahram to help me. Any exercises were marked and discussed together as soon as I was ready which was great. One thing I enjoyed was that the atmosphere was very relaxed and well-paced so even at the end of two weeks I didn't feel overly tired (well, not until the long travel back to Ireland!) and Naren gave me the brilliant advice to just do nothing until my lab the following week. So my last weeks’ preparation was plenty of long walks, sleep, and a few pints of Guinness with my friends!