Passed at 100 questions in 90 minutes

Hi all!

I can't believe I get the honor of making an 'I Passed' post! I definitely had a lot of self doubt, but lurking on this subreddit definitely helped me out a ton.

My background: 26 year old, female 5 years of infosec specific experience Two SANS certs: GCIH, GCCC And CAPM cert

Study Resources: I took a 6 day Training Camp boot camp (10/10 would recommend) my instructor Joe Barnes was amazing! While I was taking the exam his voice was in my head and I definitely would not have passed without him.

Sybex CISSP Official Study Guide (10/10) I answered all the written labs and quizzes at the end of each chapter. Chapters that I did not score well in I went back and reviewed in detail.

Sybex CISSP official practice tests (9/10) Definitely helpful to get in the right frame of mind testing wise.

Boson exam questions (9/10) These practice exam questions were so difficult for me. Very technically focused, but definitely helped highlight areas I needed to work on. I appreciated how Boson scored you on each domain, it helped me prioritize my studying.

Study schedule:

Training Camp boot camp in July. 6 days of intense training in a classroom

Studied off and on for a few months

Tore my ACL playing soccer in October and due to surgery/injury related issues did not study at all in October and beginning of November

Since my exam date was coming up and I didn't want to push it back I spent the last two weeks of November very focused on studying - took time off work and spent each day just focused on CISSP

Day of exam reviewed the student notebook provided by training camp and answered a few exam questions from Sybex to get into the test taking mode.

During the exam I was very anxious and when I got to question 100 I was prepared to keep going until 150 questions. When I saw the exam ended my first thought was I must have bombed so hard not even the additional 50 questions could save me. When I saw the paper that said I passed I couldn't believe it at first! Looking back now I feel like I just got psyched out being in the exam room, and that I really did know the material and I should not have been so anxious.

Definitely am so glad I found this community, your encouragement on posts definitely gave me the boost I needed to schedule the exam and to go ahead and keep the exam date even after I got injured. I'm so happy today I can't seem to stop smiling! 😊