Hello,

This is Charles, finally responding to your email from October 19th. You haven't interacted with me much on here, but from what you said, I definitely know you've been tracking my progress. Thanks for that; it is greatly appreciated. This is long, but we've never officially spoken, so I'm writing to fill you in on all of it. I was recommended this class by my coworker. You showed the email he sent you when he passed the exam using this class in one of your lectures for Fall '23. He spoke very highly of you and the other instructors, and I trust him greatly. You love what you do here, and it shows.

As you may know, I signed up for the on-demand version of both the water resources depth and breadth classes in September, with the overly ambitious goal of completing them and taking the Water Resources PE exam on December 6th. You, and I imagine others, might find that to be an extremely tight turn around, and you'd all be right. I now believe you when you lay out the timeline in some of your videos, because when I first heard you say that this process would take longer than three months, I was defiant. Fellow students take note: completing this material, even at an instructor-guided pace, will take minimum four months, maybe longer if you have that luxury. There is a lot of material.

Admittedly, I did not have that luxury and consequently did not complete studying and reviewing everything in the depth portion of this class. Everyone recommended starting with depth and then moving on to the breadth. I heard that and proceeded to do the complete opposite. That should not reflect badly on you; it's solely the result of me not budgeting my time, not having a study plan, and not reaching out for help. My schedule filled with priorities that seemed as important if not more so than a few hours everyday devoted to these classes, with weekends being all water all the time. I had the idea to refresh my breadth knowledge first and then rely on all of my career water resources knowledge to carry me through the second half. In November, when I really buckled down to get ready for December, I found that to have its pros and cons. I was nervous to finish the material, review for the breadth one last time, and review for the depth one final time. If I could go back, a better strategy would have been to reach out for help, and see if there was anything anyone could do for me. I imagine I'm not the first to be in this position and won't be the last.

December arrived with me being behind on the material, which means I hadn't finished watching all of the videos. That's a piece of advice I have; at a minimum, watch all the videos, and watch them at 1.25, 1.5, or even 2x speed if you have to (from a fellow slow talker, I appreciated this about the lectures). With December 6th looming, I made the decision to postpone my exam, getting very lucky to find another open slot at the same Pearson Testing Center almost two weeks later on December 18th, after repeatedly checking and not seeing one. For $50, I switched my exam slot, which is another piece of advice I recommend. There's no shame in doing whatever you need to get piece of mind around this experience.

The extra ~2 weeks made a difference. I finished watching all the videos and took a week to review the breadth. Then, in my final week, I tried my best to review the depth. Yes, in one week. Not smart, I know, but I had to meet life on life's terms. This was the situation at hand. Over and over again, your recommendation to do only the starred problems rung in my head, but there really wasn't time to listen to that either. I had saved the quizzes and mock exams on the portal until last, so I skipped right to the end and attempted those. I was quickly reaching the point of whatever I didn't know, I wasn't ever going to.

The Sunday before my Monday exam, I sat down to take the practice depth test (a tad last minute, I know). To my dismay, what I hadn't counted on was the fact that to take the simulation depth exam in the portal, you needed to be finished with the tests that come before it. That's worthwhile knowing ahead of time for anyone looking to rush this process. I went back, started from the first mock quiz I could, and resigned myself to the fact that I may not get to take a simulated depth exam, like I did for the breadth, before my early bedtime. I got as far as I could, but ultimately was not able to sit for the 4 hour depth practice test. That made me very nervous, but something was bringing me comfort. In the last two weeks, I had worked my butt off to progress as fast as I could. I also made a concerted effort to ask the folks around me that had taken the test for any tips and tricks that they had. That may have been what saved me.

I made careful note of what you said in each lecture that related to the test. When you told us that a question like this may appear on the exam, I listened. When you suggested knowing what you call the "Friend Equation" in regards to solids loading, I filed that away. When you kept stressing to us the importance of knowing that headloss occurs in pipes from one end to the other, that it does not add like flow rates do, I made sure to remember that. I recount these things because I'll be damned if some of the questions that I saw on the exam weren't practically word for word what you showed us in the quizzes and mock exams. I buried the lead, I know, but yes, I took the exam on December 18th, despite feeling underprepared.

The test for me ended up being a lot of conceptual questions, so I was able to redistribute time (6 minutes per question) to the math intensive ones. I didn't need 6 minutes to answer the questions (yes, questions!) about headloss in two parallel pipes; you taught us how to that one in 10 seconds. Same as the ones that were merely definition based. At one point, I started (quietly) laughing to myself, because the questions felt incredibly similar to the ones we practiced on the forum. The end of my 41 breadth questions was all sludge and solids loading. Thank you Friend. The morning session felt just OK to me. I finished in 3:40 hrs. The afternoon session made my head hurt. It was mostly stuff I could attempt, save for a few questions that were, I believe, ones that NCEES was trying to test out, like you had mentioned. I used the rest of the time there.

This is all to say that, after waiting two weeks to get the results back, I found out that I successfully PASSED this exam!! I apologize for never communicating with you. I did not want to let the chance to say Thank You! pass by. You helped me invaluably. I would love to give myself all of the credit, but it was not without your and my fellow classmates efforts, who asked strong questions and got us all thinking critically about this material. I would recommend this class over and over again. I actually have been suggesting it to fellow coworkers that I now am guiding through this process. So, if this was too much to read, I apologize, but I had to tell you about my experience. If it helps anyone else even a little bit, it was worth it.

Sincerely, Charlie