If you have spent any time in the R&S forums in the IEOC, you have seen the username Deepak Arora. Deepak has achieved Elite status in the forum and is always challenging and helping his peers with his excellent posts.

Thank you so much Deepak, and we look forward to celebrating your number soon. We are placing 100 GradedLabs rack rental tokens in your account as a small gesture of our appreciation.

I am sure many are interested in Deepak's story...here it is:

I started my career in mid 2003 as a System Support Engineer after passing my 3 Year regular Diploma in Electronics (Microprocessor). During the last semester of my study in college I got this opportunity in a campus interview session. Could you believe I was just a 19 year old kid at that point with no idea how things worked in the real world ?...hehe

In 2005, I came to know about CCNA from a pretty close friend, Sushail Sharda, who suggested to me to move into the Networking Industry. I cannot thank him enough for his suggestion because that suggestion changed my life. So finally I started saving money for my CCNA exam and around June 2005 I started preparing for the CCNA exam. By the end of 2005, I passed the exam with a good score. Though it was not an easy one because it was not easy to find training classes and stuff. Of course, INE's CCNA COD and workbooks were not around at that point in time :-)

A few months after passing my CCNA, I moved to another company where I started working as a L1 support engineer and also as a part time CCNA instructor. So after getting quite a bit of experience I decided to go for CCNP. But there were a few major constraints like working on my Graduation through distance learning in parallel to my job and also finding time and equipment to prepare for CCNP. As the time passed by I was able to pass the CCNP BSCI and BCMSN exams. But ONT and ISCW looked always kind of hard for me to pass. But after over a year of hard work,  I finally got my CCNP. After that, the list of certification exams I passed keeps on growing with no stop till now.

It was the beginning of this year when I thought it's time to go for CCIE seriously.  I was thinking about it for quite some time. So I started buying INE R&S products in chunks. Soon I realized that I made my investments on the right material. I spent tons of time watching INE ATC from Brian and I must say the guy is a genius. On the other side there were so many interesting posts on blueprint topics at INE blog which really helped for a better understanding about how things work. Cannot give thanks enough to the entire INE team for such excellent content. Also I found so many bright people at the IEOC support forum like Darrell Escole , Jakub, Able etc ...they were/are helpful and some became close friends later :-)

Finally, I am going to attempt the lab in the end of April. No matter if I pass or fail in my attempt, but I know the INE stuff and all the hard work I put so far in this made me a better Engineer. Sooner or later I know I'll get my Number.

Finally... I hope to pass my lab and after getting my number I'll see if I can work for INE :-) .. hehe ... Every week I still check requirement for R&S Technical Development Engineer job requirement they list on the INE website.