I graduated from college in 1976 and will be 60 years old this year AND I work as a Construction Manager so I rarely need to use the design skills of my engineering education. This is relevant because I am not a genius and after taking Dr. INDRANIL GOSWAMI’S class I passed on the first attempt!! There is no doubt in my mind that without his class I would have never passed. If you read nothing else on this thread read this: DR. GOSWAMI’S CLASS WILL GIVE YOU EVERYTHING YOU NEED. PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT HE SAYS FOR YOUR PREPARATION, STUDY FAITHFULLY AND YOU SHOULD PASS. HIS KNOWLEDGE IS REALLY BROAD SPECTRUM AND BECAUSE HE TEACHES THE WHOLE CLASS THERE IS CONTINUITY. HE IS ALSO VERY SENSITIVE TO FEEDBACK AND WILL ANSWER EVERY QUESTION YOU HAVE AND WILL TAILOR THE CLASS BASED ON THE PARTICIPANTS IN THAT PERIOD AS OPPOSED TO A CANNED PRESENTATION FOR AN UNDEFINED AUDIENCE.
This is how I prepared:
I chose, every time, to attend the online lectures and then a few days later repeat them again from Google Sucks +. Sometimes it took me another 5-6 hours, per lecture, to make sure I really understood what he was discussing and explaining. I trusted that by understanding and building a good foundation I could always figure things out; this also gave relevance to my efforts as I realized I would carry the newly re-discovered knowledge with me for the rest of my life.
I put in about 140 hours over a period of 14 weeks (I was fairly disciplined but still had more lapses of no-study days, than I would have wished for) and spent less than 20% of my time doing problems as I concentrated on reviewing his lectures. I bought all kinds of problem practice books (5-6) “to do problems, problems, problems” but ran out of time and I never even opened them and chose instead to learn and understand from Dr. Goswami’s lectures. I only used Lindeburg’s and Goswami’s books as references, barely reading them. I hardly even did the problems in Goswami’s reference chapters, instead I concentrated on doing the problems from the lectures (which I could always replay for help) and I would come back to them a few days/weeks later to make sure I really did understand the concepts rather than just knowing how to do problems by pure technique.
As an anecdote to positive thinking: I felt ok with not having even done ONE problem in the books which I never opened (honest!), since I was planning on concentrating on doing problems for the next exam after tasking the first one as a “warm-up”. Apparently my strategy (which took some of the tension off for this go-round) was good enough since I passed the exam on the first attempt and didn’t have to study for another exam.
Hang in there, study as hard as you can, have faith, find a way to take some of the pressure off, and follow Dr. Goswami’s instructions and you’ll get all you need to pass the Civil PE exam.
