I am just taking a break from work in the upper floor of my neighborhood Starbucks and I can't help but notice a student with books piled up in front of him. One year ago, that could have been me: Getting through hydrocarbon chemistry, crude oil exploration and production, CTL development and all those other fun topics that are necessary to master for the Energy Risk Professional. Ah, the good old days...

I did enjoy the study experience a lot, I must confess, however, the amount of material was staggering at times and I was wondering whether it was really necessary to know all of the details of tankers or pipeline dynamics. I started out studying in July, with the exam four months ahead. If I had to do it again, I would definitely start earlier, say in May, to have at least six months time to go through all the material at a normal pace.

Since I studied the "old fashioned way", i.e., reading all the required material from GARP and making summaries of them that I later revised and practiced, I needed a lot of time. It also did not help that I had to travel a lot for work in September and October, which left me in some Hotel room in Canada or Beijing at 2 AM with 100 pages to read just to stay on track in my stuffed study plan. It would have helped a lot had I wrapped up the reading part earlier and could have simply revised the topics at that point.

To make up for lost time, I managed to take five days off right before the ERP exam. That was when I solved the one practice exam that was available at the time on the GARP website and revised all of my notes. I registered for the exam at UCLA in Los Angeles, so the location was somewhat convenient. Still, I needed to go check the campus out once before the exam in order not to get lost on the huge premises. This helped me quite a bit, at least I arrived relaxed at the exam site on the test day. The exam itself was somewhat of a blur, I just remember that I was quite surprised about the ambiguitiy of some of the questions, especially compared to the practice exam, which was relatively easy.

Still, I was happy to hear in January of 2011 that I had passed the ERP exam. I was surprised that I finished almost all of the topics in the upper band, so my study strategy had proven successful. If I look back, I must say I spent a lot of time for preparation, and I could have managed my study time more effectively, had I started earlier.

I am sure you will be in the same place after you have taken the exam. By all means, I wish you all the best for your ERP exam preparation!

To access my ERP study material, please click here.

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