My Series 79 experience 3 week experience

The nightmare is over.
The last 3 weeks have been somehow different, I had to take on and prepare for the wannabe banker hatable license.
I am pretty sure that all those practice question led me to dream of exotic off-shore beaches in which a diverse international crowd would meet up to issue offerings under reg.S, weddings ruined by wives trading on material non-public informations and registration dramas sadly ended at a Gun (jumping) point.

With this post I would like to share my experience, in order to give an idea of what to expect in terms of study requirements and exam.
Disclaimer:
English is not my first language;
I was not provided with classes nor study materials by my firm, so I shopped (or at least tried to) for the best price/quality and ended up using Solomon, book + exam simultator. (300ish $, I'm not advertising it, it was just the median of a comp analysis Cheap/too cheap ratio)

The book is thorough, maybe too much, it covers all the aspects of the securities related regulations subject of the exam, horribly reminding me of my bulletproof, back-bender, sleep inductor Civil Law manual back in college (Manuale di Diritto Privato by Torrente, ISBN: 8814183449, if anybody is considering alternatives to kevlar or out of ideas in the weight room, or just out of valium).
I scheduled my 3 weeks of studying as follows:
week 1: 2 hours in the morning to study the book, 2 hours in the evening to make notes and taking practice questions of the sections with immediate response/explanation. (sleep ave: 5hrs)
weekend 1: That weekend actually started Sunday, because Friday night my promoter friend talked me into his new revolutionary anti-hangover provision consisting in drinking just tequila on the rocks and stick with it. Too good to be true because last thing I remember was being in a cab, at 4am somewhere in midtown heading home. I woke up in my bed, with my belongings in place and finances untouched (how 'bout crime in NYC huh?). Saturday reminded me that i'm growing up, and finally Sunday I gave the first attempt to a timed half-exam scoring a motivational 46%
week 2: Deal flow is pretty calm so I am able to add up 2 hour of study at the office sneaking in the manual. Evenings are all dedicated to practice, since the manual won't give any grasp about the questions structure. The moment in which I identified the difference between Registration, Reg A+, Reg D and rule 144 my scores started skyrocketing, and also started imaging how to put real situations behind the theory, in order to fix arguments that require extra efforts because they're confusing and some how misleading and hard to understand from a foreigner perspective, but I guess this is a common denominator of all the studies that involve laws.
weekend 2: approaching 70s in the practice exams looked indeed as a reason to celebrate. Trying to reverse engineer the savvy suggestion received a week earlier, I stick with vodka, allowing only to jump from beluga to grey goose, the practice somehow felt like a conflict of interest, and made the proper disclosure with the bartender. Magically I get home remembering it. It worked. Saturday and Sunday are spent on regulation M and the 4th (and trickiest at my advise) section of the exam General Security Industry Regulation.
Week 3: Asked permission to work mornings only, work flow is worrisome low, granted. I did not finish my book and mostly was not willing to do so. Concentrating on the practice exam allowed me to define a general line of arguments missing that investopedia was great to summarise. scored mid 80s for Wednesday and Thursday with more than 2 hours left on average. Friday I stayed home and managed to finish the 7th season of Mad-Man and take two practice scored exactly 69% and 72%, 73% is the pass rate. The incumbent exam grounded me, and did not let me finish my scientific studies, it would have been a GinFry, RIP. Went to sleep with more doubts than sure thoughts mainly because of the bad results in the test.
Exam day: decent wake up time, breakfast, notes review.
Exam: Nothing is allowed in the exam room, they provided for everything. The second time they were stating again the exam rules, I really looked for the fast forward button, like when you're about the take off and get busted listening to your iPod, and the hostess making the security demonstration is a 5 in flight, which is different from a 5 on the ground, and you must pay attention, fast forward.
Exam: Totally different question structure from the mock exam, exhibit types that I never saw before in the practice. The mini calculator is awful, and hard to rely on when being used to excel. At around 40 question answered I notice that time was running way faster than usual, around 70 I start side-thinking on how to disclose the failure to my parents. I finish with 10 minutes spare, not enough to review more than 5 of the 85 question I flagged for review.
Time's out, 80%. PASSED