Call Me Mini-Master

Earlier this year my friend Tim Chapman and I started meeting on Friday mornings in order to do some study prep for the SQL MCM exam. Tim had recently taken a role with Microsoft as a PFE and so he knew the MCM was in his future. Me? Well, I had taken the test in its Beta form last December and thought I might take it again someday but wasn’t sure when. The weekly meetings seemed like a good idea because that way we would set aside time on a regular basis to review the materials. The idea is that over time we would be prepared.

Well, as it turns out, Tim needed to take the exam before the end of June. He wasn’t sure if he was ready or not, but in he went. And he passed. So, now our study group was unbalanced a bit. I decided that I should look to expand our group a bit and started offering an MCM hangout on Google+ on Friday mornings. I hosted two of them before heading away on vacation, and last week I was busy in Ft. Lauderdale so I didn’t host one again.

Here’s where things get weird. See, I had been in the habit of rescheduling my exam with Prometric. If I wasn’t ready, I would push it back by 6-8 weeks each time. This was fine until they decided to charge me a $35 fee for a reschedule. I didn’t want to pay the fee, but I didn’t want to take the exam either. So, I went to cancel the exam and…yeah… a $35 cancel fee as well. At this point I was fairly certain that Prometric was going to find a way to charge me for a no-show as well, so I was locked in to taking the exam despite (1) not having prepared as well as I would have liked and (2) not having touched any type of MCM prep in well over two weeks.

So, in I went. And while I can’t give you specifics about the exam, I will say that this time around the questions seemed much more polished than the Beta version I took previously. I provided some feedback to Robert Davis already regarding some questions that I felt were less than stellar, and Robert knows I would be very willing to provide additional feedback in the future. That was on Monday. By Tuesday afternoon Robert was sending me news of the results that I had passed the exam. I was, and still am, surprised by that. I do find it interesting that both Tim and I passed, even though we were both kinda forced to take it before we felt “ready”.

I still plan to have the Friday hangouts, because I still need to pass the lab portion of the exam. Oh, and that portion costs money ($2,000). Andy Leonard suggested that I have a bake bacon sale in order to raise the funds, and I think it is a good idea. I honestly have no idea how I am going to be able to pay for the lab, perhaps I could sell shares in myself? You know, have people invest $100 or something and then they can “own” my output until such time as I buy back the shares?

Nah, too complex. I’m just going to sell bacon instead. Until then, you can call me “mini-master”.