After receiving the confirmation when are you able to register with NCEES for the 8 hour exam? Also, when can you sign up for the Seismic and Surveying?
Did you self-study and any tips to study?
Uh, registering for the 8 hour isn't important since it's a fixed day but it's like 10 weeks after getting the notice or something, I honestly forgot. I was allowed to register for Seismic/Surveying on Aug 24 and earliest date is Oct 20th. So 2 months before the first exam date I think is typical.
I took a Seismic Course, which I think is incredibly helpful unless you're a structural engineer and do all that ASCE-7/CBC fun stuff already. Trying to learn that on your own would be a bear.
I self-studied for PE and Surveying though. As Lomarandil said, knowing where to look things up is very important for the PE. Time isn't a big deal and I finished early-ish on those. Honestly you could finish the PE afternoon and morning exams in 2.5 hours if you really knew your stuff. But if you don't know where stuff is you might be screwed. I recommend printing out the List of Topics that NCEES has on their site and going through and studying up on each topic.
For example, under Hydrology Topics there was a bunch of Runoff, Detention Basin, SCS Graphical/Rational method and all this stuff I never heard of before. So I downloaded a "Highway Hydrology" handbook by FHWA, bound it (so I could bring it into the exam) and studied teh hell out of those topics. I also used the CERM to study topics but honestly it's not quite as helpful and not a good study tool. The hydrology thing saved my *** since there were at least like 3-4 questions that were pretty much straight out of what I studied from the Highway Hydrology (but the CERM lacked the detail so) book on those topics and I think I nailed each one confidently
I also had a similar transportation handbook that was helpful (but there were only a few anyways) that I had printed and studied relevant topics and tabbed anything of interest (like speed, esal).
Also while I was doing this, I wrote my own cheatsheets and put them in a binder for various topics so it helps reinforce it in your mind and it makes a very quick go-to reference.
The thing to do to study is really just do practice problems after problems. Even if a number of them aren't relevant, it will show you deficiencies and what you need to brush up and tab or know to reference/look-up if a similar problem arises. I actually felt like the writers of PE exam made sure that none of their questions could be quickly answered by looking it up in the CERM, intentionally, so really have some handbooks that are readily available from government agencies (Navfac, FHWA, etc).
Survey: I actually had a good book by Ghilani and Wolf from undergrad (an old edition like 12th is only $20) that is very comprehensive. I also did a lot of practice problems (some practice ones by Mansour were definitely uncannily close to some exam problems) although I reviewed a bunch of topics like basics of GPS, Differential Levelling, Errors with different tools, lattittude/departure, area by coordinates, horizontal/vertical curves, etc in much more detail than a brief reference guide will ever give you. Which was helpful because I guarantee you will have problems that ask those questions in some form or another and often these question writers are tricky enough to ask you just something that is a little out of reach of a typical quick reference.
Really though the big thing with that is just type. It's honestly kind of BS since conceptually the stuff isn't hard and I bet if I just gave you the exam right now you could probably reason through most of it just from basic trig/similar triangles/law of (co)sines and such; although it might take you awhile to carefully and meticulously go through each little step whereas on the exam they expect you to know a bunch of shortcuts and stuff which is kind of against the spirit of surveying, a very meticulous and careful art. But eh, them's the breaks.
