u/Muted_Basil_9581

Despite serious self doubt, and leaving the test center with confidence that I failed... I have passed the Civil FE first try! I have so much to say but first I want to thank this community tremendously. I graduated a year ago and missed out on my university's FE prep course because of my dads passing during my final year. I had no clue where to begin with finding resources or even structuring my schedule. Don't want to make this sappy but yeah, very grateful to this community. Ok now the important stuff-

Some context: I work full time, graduated a year ago, and studied Architecture and Architectural Engineering. This means that I was missing prior knowledge on a good 1/3 of the topics because I never took those classes. I know a lot of people experience something similar and I am here to ease your mind.

I started studying 6 weeks before I took the exam and used PrepFE, the NCEES Practice exams (vol 1 and 2) and ISLAM 2 full length practice test book on amazon. I spent the first 2 weeks doing about 20-35 practice problems a day on prepFE and focused topic by topic. It was about 2 hours of studying a day. I took a lot of notes during this time. This helped me gauge which topics I had to seriously focus on and which ones I could be lax in.
This was.... humbling and nerve wrecking because why the heck was I even struggling with math. Obv, was scoring very low in transpo, environmental, surveying, water resources, and ESPECIALLY geotech. But! I was improving. I just kept doing practice problems. After the 2 week mark, I took half a timed practice test every weekend on sunday morning. Starting with NCEES Civil Vol 1.

Here's what I think really helped me. I spent the next three days (mon-wed) after each practice exam going over the entire 55 questions IN DEPTH. I'm talking notes, videos, random resources online, literally anything to help me understand every aspect of the question. You really have to focus on your fundamentals, and I found this to be the only way of doing so. I scored a 50% on the Vol 1. Then in vol 2 (the following week) I scored around a 70%. I was stoked, Amazing right? WRONG

The following week, I transitioned to using the ISLAM practice tests and scored a 43%. At this point I had 2 more weekends left and one of the weekends was the day before my exam... I started panicking. The ISLAM exams were WAYYYY harder than the NCEES ones and even the PrepFE questions (which I was scoring about 60% on). Anyways, I kept doing the same thing just reviewing and doing more and more practice questions. In the last week, I watched MM and kept going through the ISLAM questions. used prepFE when I felt like I needed to focus on a topic. The weekend before the exam, I took one last ISLAM 1/2 test and scored a 50%. At this point, I was sure I was gonna fail.

THE EXAM WAS HARDER THAN NCEES, PREPFE, AND ISLAM. I blindly guessed on a good 20-25 questions. I ran out of time in the second half and had to speed through the last 15 questions (which were mostly transpo) by putting in literally any answer. Couldn't even read some of those questions.

I think what made me pass was the curve BUT *reviewing* those practice exams helped me build by fundamentals a ton. I dont think I realized it at the time but it helped me navigate the handbook during the exam and take a lot more educated guesses. The math questions on the exam were harder than the ones I studied. ALLLL the fluid questions had me stumped. To be frank, there were very very few questions that were like something I had seen (of the ones that weren't just plug and chug). But I guess I did pretty good on the ones I intentionally answered. Ultimately, going over question explanations and relearning certain concepts was the best thing imo.

That is my biggest tip. There is so much content to study that memorizing certain question styles will really not help IN MY OPINION. You're better off understanding the concepts of each topic. I am not an advocate of AI whatsoever but you could possibly generate study guides to help you refine your knowledge on fundamentals. If you're gonna memorize anything, maybe it should be the Handbook honestly.

A lot of people on here said to do 1000 questions in order to pass. That may work for a certain group of people but tbh I probably did a total of 400-500 questions. Majority of my study time went into reviewing answers and explanations. Seeing different question styles (NCEES, PrepFE, MM, and ISLAM) helps a lot too. Looking back, NCEES exams were way too easy. Wording was similar to the real exam but generally I felt like they were worlds apart in terms of difficulty.

In terms of resources, ISLAM was the most helpful one in preparing me for the exam and Mark Mattson was the most helpful one in teaching me the concepts of the classes I never took.

Anyways, sorry for this insane ramble, but this is my very candid experience. Hopefully it helps someone out there. I truly believe we can all pass, its just a matter of studying with intention- which is basically what I am getting at with this entire-way too long- post.

P.S.
I want to talk a little about test anxiety. I suffer with this BADLYYY. The entire week before my exam was terrible in terms of nerves. Even after the exam I had 2 separate dreams that I failed. The night before my exam, I dreamt of my late father consoling me. This helped me a lot. I am so grateful he visited me because it almost completely took away all my worries (no longer cared if I would pass or fail). But in the future when stakes are higher and I take my PE, I want to know how to deal with this stress. Does anyone have any tips?

P.P.S
I am so excited to put "Not Interested" the next time Mark Mattson is recommended to me on youtube... nothing against him of course.