|
Hi! All
Like a lot of things, I’ve procrastinated about doing CCNA
too. Well when I finally decided it was time to do it, my
first self assigned task was to find a professional
institution to do the course from. If you know me personally
you’ll know that this is a departure from my typical self
learning style and a general rebellious attitude towards any
kind of organized education system. But I’ve heard scores of
stories of people being overconfident and attempting to
clear this course on their own but after a number of failed
attempts people generally wisen up. But given the current
economic climate, I figured giving the exam multiple times
at close to 13,000 a sitting wouldn’t suit my health too
much. I might be headstrong and stubborn but believe me I’m
not stupid. Well a cursory glance through the papers gave me
3 maybe 4 options, each with their own fancy advert and each
quite visibly trying to sell his product, well this is
totally fine, I mean its a free market and to each his own.
But something about the extreme commercialness of these so
called “professional institutes” put me off to the whole
idea of joining a class. I mean its like everyone is having
a print war on who has more Routers & Switches, nobody was
really talking about the course and the structure. I even
had the opportunity to speak to the “Center
Director” of one of these places and he was
trying to sell me Cisco, I had to literally stop him and
say, “Dude, I’m enquiring about the CCNA course specifically
so like ‘duh‘ I know what Cisco is” and he
went on to tell me that his “institute” had
a different approach, and that they gave their students
“hands-on” experience on routers and switches. This kind of
got me thinking, like I mentioned before I’m kinda allergic
to classes, so I figured that I could buy a router of my
own, or maybe run an emulator/simulator or something and
learn it on my own. He then went on to say that there were
places that had like a 100 students and they focused only on
theoretical knowledge and immediately I caught on, if you
ask me knowledge is only theoretical, practicals give you
experience, and I was looking for the former, because I
don’t need to pay anyone to get the later. I politely said I
would get back to him, never intending to keep to my word.
My next step was to ask my colleagues and acquaintances and
one name that kept repeating without fail was RST Forum.
I learnt that Forum was in Matunga, so I set
my mind to it, since I’ve had a very old connection to the
place and it seemed like providence that the classes were
located there. Interestingly this was starting to tickle my
rebel attitude quite strongly, simply because even after
searching almost every news paper and classified listing I
could find no mention of this Sir or this so called RST, I
didn’t even know the expansion then. One of my friends told
me that he had a number somewhere but unfortunately he
didn’t respond, I’m glad he didn’t, it made the thrill of
the search even more exciting. I then did something I
should’ve done right at the beginning. “/facepalm”
I googled for CCNA classes in the Matunga area, and sure
enough I found a website. It was pretty well organized, and
thankfully after a good 20 minutes I found no mention of the
number or type of routers or switches. I said to myself
“Here’s a place that doesn’t need to sell itself, they’re so
inaccessible it must be brilliant!” The truth is that a
place like RST doesn’t need print ads or any kind of
marketing at all is testimony of the quality of knowledge
sharing. I quickly enrolled and gave myself a virtual
“pat-on-the-back” for my efforts. I found out that a CCNA
batch began the exact same day, unfortunately due to prior
commitments I wasn’t able to attend but then I joined from
the following day. When I reached the class I was quickly
repenting everything I said in the 3 lines above this. It
was a fairly large room with Speakers and benches, Lots of
them! I figured there might be close to 50 people there,
thats when I was proved wrong yet again! I filled out the
form and learnt that I was the 113th person to
enroll for this batch, I was trying to come up with a way to
get out of this one with minimum damage. A little bit later,
Sir arrives, If you know me you’ll know that I start
forming an opinion about everyone, even if I don’t need to,
He looked borderline weird, well I classify most people as
that, including me ;) , then everyone wished him like we
were in school “good morning sir” I was like wait on one dog
gone minute! I hardly ever did that in school, let alone
college and I am certainly not doing it now. The sheer fact
that I was boxed in and the class had 120 odd people in it
stopped me from walking out the same day. I’m glad! Sir then
started teaching and instantly I was giving myself back-pats
again. His attitude, manner of teaching, and expressing
almost anything was exactly what I was looking for because
it was exactly like me! I realized that here’s a guy who
actually knows what he’s talking about! Anybody who’s
attended his classes will agree that his personality is so
magnetic and he just has a way of routing the information
straight to your brain. In the industry we have a term
“Baap” literally means father. Someone who knows everything
there is to know about a topic is said to be a Baap of the
topic. I would have initially found this hard to admit but
Sir truly is the Baap of networking! Anyways
I’m about to give my CCNA exams in a couple of days as of
this post so I’ll keep you updated.
May the Force be with you!
GR
|
