Well we’re already 3 months into the year and I’m already falling behind on my personal goal of finishing my MCSE by the end of the financial year. I have been keeping up my study regularly this year and have finished initial studies of the majority of exams, but yet to do final study on these and actually sit them.

So last Friday, I decided to pull my finger out and I booked in my first Windows Server 2003 exam, 70-290: Managing and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Environment.

I went home for the weekend with my brother and sister, for a belated birthday present for Dad; riding round wineries in Rutherglen. It was a great weekend and obviously had a some good patches of not doing much (especially in the car), making room for some decent periods of study. Having finished studying for this certification in December before I started my new job and with 3 months on-the-job experience since starting in January at my new job, I was very confident that this exam wouldn’t pose too much trouble for me. Over the weekend I did 100s of example questions, averaging around low 80% for these. I was happy with this, especially considering every question I got wrong, I would see what the correct answer was and why this was…so even when I was getting questions incorrect, I was learning about these and wouldn’t make the same mistakes twice.

I had a mini sleep-in this morning and wasn’t particularly worried about cramming in study this morning, instead blasting music, starting my Twitter account and cruising through a bunch of sample questions…procrastination was rife! I rocked in to the exam, very confident I knew the material inside and out. That was until I was actually doing the exam and started crapping my dacks! I was expecting to see questions similar to what I had been studying (since I have probably done about 400-500 example questions on this exam), but nothing at all was similar; it was all new and quite scary! I uncomfortably answered my way through, using the knowledge and experience I had built up. But I was not confident I had done well at all, on the contrary, I was very sure that I wasn’t going to pass (you require 700/1000 to pass)…I found it extremely hard. I finished the last question then held my breath as the very slow computer system calculated my score…only to find out I got 904/1000!

So I left feeling very happy with myself, although physically I felt like I had failed (thanks adrenaline!). Fortunately all the hard work paid off though. 2 Down, 5 to go!