I did a bootcamp in May with The Training Camp (
the US site is
I looked at Wave's camp to but it seemed basically a "here's all the stuff now go and study on your own then come back for a week to take the exams". This wasn't what I wanted as my main problem was lack of motivation to self-study.
Training Camp have a different approach - basically no real pre-camp study is needed but they do emphasise you need experience (1-2 years) before you should attend if you want a good chance of passing.
It was a tough course, 14 days straight (you don't get a break on weekends!). The first week was tougher than the second week IMO as you were cramming stuff in that you could re-use for the second week exams.
My average day for the first week was:
5:30am wake up and continue homework from previous night
7:00am shower/get ready
7:30-8:00am breakfast
8:00am-9:00am continue with homework
9am-9pm instructor led class (90% lectures, not much labs) 30mins for lunch and dinner and a few 10 minute breaks
9pm-1:30am homework (basically a lot of reading + Self-Test exams)
So we were doing 20 hour days (I settled down to around 16 hour days for the second week
). It sounds a crazy amount of work, which it was but it's also weird how fast you get used to it.
The homework set was basically read a book everynight (sometimes 2...) and answer some questions which is why it took so long, by the second week thoguh I'd learned to be a lot more picky about what I read (basically I focused on the areas I knew I was weak on rather than waste time skim reading stuff I was confident on).
They provided a laptop for the course with Self-Test software on it which I thought was good (a few students complained it was poor though). Unfortunately only having one laptop and without VMWare or Virtual PC doing some of the labs was impossible outside of class hours which were generally taken up with lectures.
The course started with 12 people but I think only 9 were doing the full MCSE, only 2 of us passed all 7 exams and it wasn't a coincidence we both had the most real-world experience with Windows 2000/2003. I can't see how anyone can pass all 7 without extensive experience, the lectures just don't go into enough detail in some areas IMO.
I've attended several 'normal' Microsoft 3 and 5 days course in the past and they're generaly 9am-4:30pm at a fairly relaxed pace where you get a lot of time to ask the instructor about how a certain thing would fit into your own company environment or to discuss a particulr issue you've had in the past. Forget all that when you go on a bootcamp - asking questions because you didn't understand something is fine but everything else is deemed wasting the instructor's time and frowned upon. 9am-9pm sounds like a lot of time each day for the instructor to do some lectures then have a casual review/chat session after - it isn't, the volume of information conveyed in the course is huge.
Reading the above might be enough to put most people off - that's not my intention, I think bootcamps are great for people in my situation (real-world experience and too lazy/unfocused to self-study etc). But I wouldn't recommend it to people without real-world experience and preferrably some previous Microsoft exam experience (some people on my course had never taken an MS exam before and it was much harder for them because of it as they also had to get used to the question format).
Personally I have 7 years experience of MS server O/S's and have done NT and Win2000 MCP's in the past. The 2003 MCSE was a step up in difficulty from those and I struggled on the course, it's amazing how much you don't know even when using the product every day
At the end of the day though I passed and have a great stress lifted from me - I don't think I could have done it without attending the Training Camp...
