Contributed by Christine Kjellberg and Stacey Hamilton

“It's weird...you know the end of something great is coming, but you want to hold on, just for one more second...just so it can hurt a little more.”

--author unknown

As interesting as this journey toward the certification exam has been, it—like all things—must come to an end. We are pleased (very pleased, in fact) to announce that we’ve both signed up to take the Base Certification exam in October. We’ve calculated that we’ll be finished with the Certification Prep Guide by that time, and perhaps we’ll have time to take a practice test or two. We are certainly not confident that we’ll pass, but we hope that by that time we will have achieved some of the other goals we had coming into this. Have we learned more about SAS than we ever thought possible? Check. Have we inspired others to become certified? I sure hope so. And we definitely learned that certification is not something that anyone should take lightly. It takes a commitment and it takes time (and some real-life SAS experience helps too).

The other day we posed the question on our SAS Publishing Facebook page: “How many of our fans are SAS certified?” We received and overwhelming response, and you can sense the pride in those who responded in the affirmative. I hope we join that elite group this fall, but we aren’t making any promises. In the meantime, continue to follow our journey. And keep the good wishes coming. We need each and every one of them!