faisalistheman
Member
- Joined
- Oct 28, 2016
- Messages
- 5
- Reaction score
- 0
Hello Everyone!
After posting my FE exam prep from October 2016 found here:
I decided to go strong and work towards my PE Power. Like I mentioned before, I already had the required 4 years of work experience between both Canada and the US, so I decided to apply for the PE Exam and write it in the coming April 2017. I would say, from talking with coworkers, peers, and just overall looking at all the material available it was really intimidating and overwhelming at first. I was very nervous about this exam from the get-go even after studying for the FE and passing it. Having done the FE just recently should help, is what I kept hearing from everyone, but of course I was finding it hard to connect the dots between the FE and the PE exams. Primarily, because the FE really is very basic level understanding of electrical engineering (First and Second year course material from University) whereas the PE is more like the third and fourth year materials + codebooks.
In any case, I didn't have a great plan of studying for this like I did for the FE. With the FE I just took the reference material and followed their plans. With the PE, I asked around at work for what was available, and luckily there were a couple folks that had 5-6 different NCEES PE Power Practice Exam and Camara's booklets that combined had over a 1000 problems. I also printed out the NEC 2017, the NESC 2012, the NFPA 70 2017, the ANSI Device Numbers, and had a copy of the EPRM by John Camara. This last book was what I used to start my prep.
Similar to the FE prep, I first went through the EPRM entirely and thoroughly. Then I went through a whole bunch of videos on youtube related to Power problems, notable mention Raiya Energy Academy. Again, while I don't always agree with Raiya's solutions, her problems and walk throughs are worth looking into. She gets the steps right 99 percent of the time, but the answer might be wrong in some cases. She corrects herself in most cases.
After I finished the EPRM book, I went through the entire NEC 2017 code book and sticky tabbed most of the important and often used artices, (See Raiya's video on Must Know NEC Articles). I have to admit, you are not going to remember where each article is. So heavily rely on the index pages of these code books in the end of the books.
After the NEC, I went through the NESC codebook and the NFPA codebooks fairly quickly in order to get the gist of the materials.
The last four weeks before the exam, all I did was problems problems problems. I have to admit, after I did the exam, I had a sense of relief, it was either from finishing a long 9.5 hours day (including breaks) or I was fairly confident in what I had answered were correct. For anyone thinking that there isn't enough time in the exam, if you prepared as much as I did, and I think you should, then you should have enough time to write the exam and still have 45 minutes in the end to check everything. I had finished checking and still left a half an hour earlier.
Total time taken to study: Once I passed the FE, and got my approval that I had been registered for the PE exam in February, I started studying Mid February. From Mid-Feb to April 19th, I spent 8 weeks studying. Weekends were the busiest (6-8 hours each day) and then 3-4 weeknights of one hour each.
Prep Prep Prep, is all I can say. I can usually gauge whether or not one would need to study as much or not for a certain exam, however, both before and even after writing the PE exam, I have to say you must put in your hours to study. It is not that hard, but it is not trivial.
So I passed, and the results came out exactly 1 Month and 5 days later.
Good luck to Oct 2017s and future PEs.
After posting my FE exam prep from October 2016 found here:
I decided to go strong and work towards my PE Power. Like I mentioned before, I already had the required 4 years of work experience between both Canada and the US, so I decided to apply for the PE Exam and write it in the coming April 2017. I would say, from talking with coworkers, peers, and just overall looking at all the material available it was really intimidating and overwhelming at first. I was very nervous about this exam from the get-go even after studying for the FE and passing it. Having done the FE just recently should help, is what I kept hearing from everyone, but of course I was finding it hard to connect the dots between the FE and the PE exams. Primarily, because the FE really is very basic level understanding of electrical engineering (First and Second year course material from University) whereas the PE is more like the third and fourth year materials + codebooks.
In any case, I didn't have a great plan of studying for this like I did for the FE. With the FE I just took the reference material and followed their plans. With the PE, I asked around at work for what was available, and luckily there were a couple folks that had 5-6 different NCEES PE Power Practice Exam and Camara's booklets that combined had over a 1000 problems. I also printed out the NEC 2017, the NESC 2012, the NFPA 70 2017, the ANSI Device Numbers, and had a copy of the EPRM by John Camara. This last book was what I used to start my prep.
Similar to the FE prep, I first went through the EPRM entirely and thoroughly. Then I went through a whole bunch of videos on youtube related to Power problems, notable mention Raiya Energy Academy. Again, while I don't always agree with Raiya's solutions, her problems and walk throughs are worth looking into. She gets the steps right 99 percent of the time, but the answer might be wrong in some cases. She corrects herself in most cases.
After I finished the EPRM book, I went through the entire NEC 2017 code book and sticky tabbed most of the important and often used artices, (See Raiya's video on Must Know NEC Articles). I have to admit, you are not going to remember where each article is. So heavily rely on the index pages of these code books in the end of the books.
After the NEC, I went through the NESC codebook and the NFPA codebooks fairly quickly in order to get the gist of the materials.
The last four weeks before the exam, all I did was problems problems problems. I have to admit, after I did the exam, I had a sense of relief, it was either from finishing a long 9.5 hours day (including breaks) or I was fairly confident in what I had answered were correct. For anyone thinking that there isn't enough time in the exam, if you prepared as much as I did, and I think you should, then you should have enough time to write the exam and still have 45 minutes in the end to check everything. I had finished checking and still left a half an hour earlier.
Total time taken to study: Once I passed the FE, and got my approval that I had been registered for the PE exam in February, I started studying Mid February. From Mid-Feb to April 19th, I spent 8 weeks studying. Weekends were the busiest (6-8 hours each day) and then 3-4 weeknights of one hour each.
Prep Prep Prep, is all I can say. I can usually gauge whether or not one would need to study as much or not for a certain exam, however, both before and even after writing the PE exam, I have to say you must put in your hours to study. It is not that hard, but it is not trivial.
So I passed, and the results came out exactly 1 Month and 5 days later.
Good luck to Oct 2017s and future PEs.
