I wonder if I am the oldest Certification candidate in the UK who is not working in IT and indeed I am long retired being a carer to my disabled husband. I am 63.

I am very lucky because my local College has become a Microsoft Academy and my old City and Guilds Networking level 3 tutor is now an MCT and running the class. I get full fee remission and an access fund pays for my materials. All I pay is thirty quid College Registration fee. My tutor is very supportive too. I have had problems settling into the course and suffered early burnout and went off the idea for a while but some honest emails between myself and the tutor and a quick chat with him today has restored my faith in my ability to succeed.

Furthermore, I emailed the tutor this evening with a question about installing the eval copy of Server 2003 in the resource kit which I need to do the labs and so on and he came right back within a minute or so - how's that for support and I have created the new NTFS primary partition and am ready to instal. I will then use the XP partition my other computer as a client for practice. The fun comes when I get my new computer and can run two clients!

Funny, I was really down yesterday but now I am really looking forward to the rest of the course and even the exams - is this normal for MCSE candidates?