Passed AWS SAA-C03 with 871/1000 as a BTech student - sharing my journey, tips, and asking what's next!
Just passed my AWS SAA-C03 with 871/1000 and wanted to share my experience.
Background: 6th semester BTech CSE student. Been using AWS for about a year through personal projects - I run a self-hosted k3s cluster in my bedroom with Cloudflare tunnels, CI/CD pipelines, and multiple services deployed. So I wasn't starting from zero.
Prep (2 months total):
Month 1 - Stephane Maarek's course on Udemy. Watched everything, took notes, didn't rush.
Month 2 - Stephane Maarek's mocks, then moved to Tutorials Dojo mocks.
Mock scores:
Started with Stephane Maarek's mocks - 61, 70, 75, 67, 73, 70. Inconsistent and honestly it scared me. So I just went ahead and got the Tutorials Dojo mock pack (8 mocks).
Did 6 out of 8 TD mocks and was consistently hitting 70-85%. Mock 7 was the toughest for me.
Exam experience: Honestly way easier than TD mocks. If you're consistently hitting 70%+ on TD you're ready. Don't let mock 7 scare you.
Tips:
- TD is harder than the real exam
- Know core services deeply - S3, VPC, IAM, Lambda, RDS, ELB
- Niche services just know what they're for, not deep details
- Flag confusing questions, move on, come back
What's next?
So here's my situation - I'm a tier 3 college guy with campus placements 2-3 months away. My projects are always evolving (homelab never sleeps lol) and I'm actively doing DSA prep alongside everything else. I feel reasonably confident in both cloud and software development and honestly I love both - I'd be happy landing a cloud/DevOps role or a traditional SDE role.
Now the question is - what do I do with the next 2-3 months cert wise? Do I go deeper into AWS (SOA, DVA, SAP)? Do I pivot to Azure since some companies prefer it? Or do I just drop certs for now and double down on projects and DSA?
Would love to hear from people who were in a similar spot as a student - what did you do and what would you do differently? And also from experienced folks in the industry - what would you actually recommend to a fresher trying to break into cloud or SDE roles?