You are ready whether or not you think you are.  Your education and background have prepared you to take the exams but the hardest part for preparing for the exam is the overwhelming feeling that you have to climb a tall mountain and once you leave basecamp you are not going to make it with the supplies and experience that you have.  This is understandable and a common theme among most of the qualified designers whom I have met over the years.

This feeling that you have to climb a mountain that is very difficult is completely relevant but to climb this mountain you need a few things.  You need the desire to complete the process, and commit to taking the exams regardless of your success or failure.  You can’t let failure deter you from your ultimate goal of becoming licensed.  You have understand that it’s going to require time, money and commitment.

One thing is very true is that preparing and taking the exams is expensive.  This will never change and there are ways to reduce the costs associated with buying study material and taking the exams but in the end you have to be entrepreneurial enough to figure out how to pay for your exams, registrations, study materials, and anything else that is required to be able to sit for all the exams over the next 6 months.  The next hardest part is to find the time to be able to study and prepare for the exams.  You are going on a journey through time and space towards a valiant goal, it is not going to be without a commitment of time, mental stamina, and resources.

Though this all seems pretty standard so far.  You are going to need to pass the exams, all of them before you become licensed.  You are going to need to commit time during your process towards studying.  Yet for me there is another key component to my ability to have passed the exams and I think it will help you as well.  This other key competent is neural plasticity.  After spending a number of years out of the rigorous education system you have probably not studied as intensely as what will be expected of you in the coming months.  Your brain has been focused on various other things but learning and retaining information of this breath and scale has not happened in a long time.  This is where the wonder of the brain can come into your favor if you treat it correctly and provide it with the various things that it needs to thrive in these conditions.

Neural Plasticity is the concept that the brain has the ability to strengthen over time if it is put into the correct conditions.  After reading the book The Rise of Superman I started to realize that the brain is a very powerful device but unlike a computer it requires a unique set of inputs to help it become more resilient over a short period of time, and throughout it’s operational lifespan.  One is exercise.  This was critical to my success in passing the exams.  You need to get your heartbeat up first thing in the morning.  And not only get your heartbeat up but do things that are dynamic and cause your brain to focus on things outside of your daily routine and on the activities that you are doing to raise your physical activity level.  I also started playing a variety of brain games.  One that I like is Lumosity.  This is an online brain training game that allows me to play different games which allow me to focus on working different parts of my brain.

Below I will outline the steps necessary to get licensed.

Steps:

1. Graduate College from an accredited Architectural school that is either a 5 year program, or a masters program.
2. You must have completed the necessary requirements to establish your NCARB record, which includes graduating college or having the necessary experience (which varies from state to state if it is still available). You can go here and start that process of creating an NCARB record.
3. Once you have completed the NCARB registration you need to go to your states registration board and apply to sit for the exam.  They will request information from NCARB and after this is complete you should get an authorization to test letter from the state from which you hope to obtain your first initial license.
4. Next you will take your registration number and proceed to the Prometric website to register for your first exam.
5. Now you will sit for 7 exams that are around 4 hours each and potentially a supplemental exam depending on where you are getting your first license.
6. Complete internship requirements and finalize with NCARB.  NCARB will do a final review of your hours after you feel the hours have been completed in the various areas from which you are required to satisfy.
7. Once you finish you will be sent a letter stating that you have completed all the portions of the exam and you may apply for your license through the state board that you are applying for registration.

Those steps should be pretty clear.  You don’t have to wait until you finish your internship in most cases and can begin taking the exams typically right after you graduate.  I suggest taking the exams as soon as your are authorized to do so.  Waiting until you get more experience in the profession doesn’t necessarily help in all aspects of the exam.

I chose to take an exam in a very rapid sequence for a number of reasons.  First I wanted to be licensed prior to the end of the year I had started them.  Next I wanted to have a life after exams but knew the longer I was in the exam taking process the longer I would be isolated from the rest of the world.

Here is my daily schedule for preparing for the exams:

1. Wake-Up at 5am
2. Do intense exercise for 45-60 min.
   1. Run 1 mile to work out area
   2. 3 x 20 push-ups
   3. 3 x 10 burpees
   4. 30 walking lunges
   5. 3 x 10 pull-ups
   6. Run 1 mile back to base camp
3. Lumosity (daily recommended games)
4. Shower (required)
5. Eat healthy breakfast, I would make green drinks every morning (I will provide some recipes for these soon.)
6. Drive to work get there around 7am
7. Read 20-40 minutes
8. ARE multiple choice questions from study books or NCARB
9. One vignette each morning
10. Work 8 hours
11. Go home if not driving do flash cards, if driving listen to audio version of study material.  (I created my own audio versions of my study material which I can explain the technique in another post.)
12. Read recommend book from NCARB for that exam for 1 hour.  This was more to relax as the books that are recommended only helped me as a professional and are interesting on their own.
13. Read study material for 1 hour
14. Multiple Choice for half an hour

Repeat 5 days a week, maybe taking off Friday night, studying a little Saturday morning.

Let’s dissect this method a little and then discuss study materials, study methodology, frequency of exams, signing up for exams, and neural plasticity.

First why get up at 5am, that’s crazy.  Well depends on your personality and optimal study performance, but in reality I don’t think it maters too much.  You need to get up regardless if you start at 8am or 9am or later.  You need to motivated to study so for me studying in the winter is best because it’s dark longer hours of the day.  Neural Plasticity requires that the brain be optimally performing through the increase in oxygen and various chemicals your body produces when it’s working out intensely consistently.  Therefore to perform and focus most concertedly you need to work out.  This will help you retain resilience throughout your day, help you stay healthy, make you feel better for physically and mentally, and this will help your brain regrow brain cells and increase your retention and provide you with a little boost everyday.  I could tell the difference the mornings I didn’t work out and the mornings I did when I went through my multiple choice exams.

 

Study Materials:

1. One awesome study material that I highly recommend and give a lot of my success to is the NASLA study materials especially the vignette videos.  You can get the entire package or you can buy access to the entire video suite or you can buy access to the individual videos as needed.  I bought them individually and probably but all but a couple of them throughout the process.  These videos were very helpful for me.
2. There are a couple of study books from different authors.  I recommend getting your hands on both of the books as they are different from one and other and cover different elements of the exam.  One is by an Author named Ken Balast.  His books are very thorough and cover some great information.
3. The other book is by _____
4. I also recommend the flash cards from NASLA.  This are great to just flip through on bus, or train as you ride into work or if you are just killing time between meetings or wherever.
5. Recommended books from the exam overviews from NCARB
6. Running shoes
7. Running pants
8. Running jacket
9. Study music, if you can handle it.  I like to listen to progressive house music because the tracks are typically over an hour long and provide a pretty steady level of lyricalness music and consistent sound.
10. Vitamix (any blender will do but I found the Vitamix really crushes up all the things I throw into it.)

Things to put on hold for 6-8 months.

1. TV watching.  I didn’t have a TV, still don’t have a TV and this helped me stay focused on things that mattered more to me than catching up on some zombie TV show or whatever.  Technology today will allow you to record whatever you want and then you can watch TV for a week once you pass your last exam.
2. Hanging out with friends on a school night.  You have a rigorous schedule for the next few months.
3. Staying late at work.  Get your work done in the allotted amount of time you have available throughout the day.
4. Telling anyone that you are studying.
5. Telling anyone you passed an exam.
6. Going out to dinner, going to the movies during the week, playing video games, studying for something else.
7. Treats with lots of sugar in them.  Give up sugar in your coffee too.  Reduce that amount of coffee you do drink.

Why study this way?  Well I found that if I exercise first thing in the morning I had more focus, more oxygen in my brain, which allowed me to retain more information.  Another reason I studied this way is that I wasn’t solely focused on reading a 300 page book in a week, and going through as may test exams as I could.  I was more concerned with balance and retention, as well as mental agility.  Things are going to get stressful regardless of how you proceed through this process.  Something is going to come up around your exam date and you will have to focus on but don’t move the test date back to another date.  You will need the strength to focus and also let go of things quickly and this method allows you to train your brain to move smoothly through all scenarios.  For example;  I was preparing for my first exam of my new round of exams.  At this point I had failed two exams two years ahead of this upcoming exam but I was also studying a lot for this exam because I didn’t want to fail another one.  My cat had not been feeling well and seemed to be sick.  She went to the vet and the vet was concerned about something in her XRAY and I believe that was on the Tuesday before my Saturday exam.  She came home and seemed not to be getting better.  Friday morning I was heading to a site visit in Los Gatos instead of going to my office in San Francisco.  So I was home later than usual and got out of the shower to see my cat walking weird and wanting to hide under my bed.  I pull her out and laid her on the bed and she started to go into shock or something, and was dead a few minutes later.  I was completely floored.  This was my best friend and I wasn’t prepared for her to pass away.  Thus I am a wreck trying to figure out what to do about work and this important site visit that I can’t miss, and then I realize that I have an exam tomorrow as well, and last night and today was my study break day.  In the end I drove to the site to meet the clients and talk to the civil and structural engineers and came home.  I didn’t feel like I could focus at all on the exam but I knew that at this point it was too late to reschedule and my cat would have wanted me to be strong and take the exam.

So I did.  I passed that exam and every exam after that until I became licensed.  Long story short you have to be ready for anything and not back down from your desire to become licensed.

My study style also allowed me to practice a vignette a day which helped me be very efficient for that portion of the exam.  The multiple choice exams helped me see areas I needed more clarification on and how to get a better understanding of these areas quickly.  Luminosity helped me to focus on other parts of my brain that eventually would tie back to my exams.

Finally my night study sessions were geared more along of the lines of pleasure and exploration.  I had been up since 5am and was always very tired and the idea of sitting and going through technical literature wasn’t always the easiest thing to digest after the long day.  I prefer to read my hardest material at the peak of my brain functionality which was after working out in the morning and before a bunch of distractions showed up at the office.  And the wonderful thing about reading the recommended books is that you get a better sense of the questions they are asking you through people who have had to solve them throughout the years and why they are important to know.

And if you get into a rythm you can take an exam every two weeks if you like.  I think it probably requires about 40 hours of studying for each exam but can very by your intensity and comfort level for the professional consumption of information.

What did passing all the exams and becoming licensed do for me that staying a designer didn’t?  Well this is a complicated question because it opened a lot of doors up for me, but it also closed a lot of doors as well.  I didn’t think it was possible to close any doors when I started out to become licensed but just before I did get licensed I realized that there are some things that becoming licensed will cut you off from.

The experience of preparing for the exams, and passing them was very rewarding and pleasurable once I started to get into a nice study rhythm.  I started to enjoy studying along with exercising and getting some brain training.  The brain training allowed me to measure my progress on mental strength over time and that is a good way to gauge your mental fitness even through there is some controversy about neural plasticity and brain training.  In my experience I gained a lot of flexibility and stamina from doing brain training daily while I prepared.  Some of the things I wasn’t prepared for were the politics of what happens when you get licensed in a small firm, or any firm for that mater.  I thought the principal of my three person firm would be happy that I was licensed or soon to be licensed.  It was in fact the complete opposite.

I had to find a new job just before passing my final exam the California Supplemental Exam (CSE).  It was really bad timing on his part to let me go.  My wife was 9 months pregnant and I was trying to figure out how to get time off to help take care of our newborn for a few weeks or months, as well as finish this last exam.  This principal had decided to tell me that I needed to find new work the day after he found out I had passed my last national exam at an AIA event the night before.  I approached him and said that I need to take some time off to take the exam in a couple weeks, maybe just the day or afternoon.  He let me know that because the project I had been working for the last year and half had stopped in the middle of its phase that he was going to have to let me go because there was no more work he had for me.  Thus that afternoon I cleared off my desk and left.  I have only talked to him once or twice since then and only to have him ask me how to do something with our software and his server.

I took the CSE and was now a stay at home dad for the next 3 months.  After passing 7 exams in 6 months I felt pretty confident in my agility and adaptability to the wide array of information.  The one thing about the CSE is the results are instantaneous , and I failed.  Though a few weeks later I received this cryptic message from the California Architects Board that there was a problem with the exam that I took and I could retake it immediately instead of waiting 6 months for the retake.  I passed a few weeks later.

I was licensed and am currently licensed and it wasn’t easy and doesn’t get easier because you are licensed.  Though the rewards are beyond looking for an easier future.  You and all of us are looking for a way to change the world and watch ourselves grow along the way.

For you who might be on the path or looking to start the journey, “the only easy day was yesterday.”