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Month: July 2016

Nathan

Episode 60: Dr Ania Gruszczynska

Episode

Sixty episodes! Sixty!

In Episode 60 I’m chatting to Dr Ania Gruszczynska, who completed her PhD at Aston University in 2010. Ania’s research is in sociology and gender studies, and her thesis was titled Queer enough? Contested terrains of identity deployment in the context of gay and lesbian public activism in Poland.

We explore how she came to look at this area of research, how she prepared for the viva and what happened on the day. We also talk about how her role as an IT Project Manager, and Ania tells me about her PhD Career Coach service, something that’s well worth checking out. You can find Ania on Twitter here.

As ever, drop me a line if you’d like to be a part of a future episode, and if you have any questions, comments or suggestion then feel free to email or tweet at me. Also, check out my ebooks and books on viva preparation – including The Viva Prep Handbook, which I launched this month.

Thanks for reading!

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)

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Nathan

The Viva Prep Handbook

Update

Hi!

Last week I delivered my independent Viva Survivor workshop. I’ve been excited about the possibility for a long time, and to finally do something in this way was great. I’ll try to write something about it soon, but wanted instead today to share something that I made for the workshop: The Viva Prep Handbook.

The Viva Prep Handbook_AIt started life as wanting to do a nice two-page handout for participants. It grew into a small zine, a 12-page booklet dense with practical viva preparation. It’s concise, around 3000 words, and I really like how it turned out. Here’s how it begins:

It may be that you have a luxury of time available to you between submission and the viva. It is more likely that you may have no choice but to prepare in your spare time because of work or life circumstances. This is not a problem. Why? Because this is how many PhD graduates have prepared for the viva. You can do it too.

Through the rest of this concise book I will be presenting tools and processes that you can break down into small, manageable tasks and activities. Viva preparation is not a full time job: follow these tips, tools and processes to manage your time and energy well.

You can see more about it over on the Books page, along with the print edition of my first book Fail Your Viva. It costs £3.49 to have one delivered to your door (and there are options if you want to buy it in bulk too, or buy it with Fail Your Viva). Sales help to support the podcast’s overheads and my business. I like the short but useful format of the zine, and I think I will make a few more guides like this before the end of the year.

If The Viva Prep Handbook sounds useful to you, go ahead and order a copy from the Books page – or via the Paypal button at the bottom of this post – I’ll get it in the post to you as soon as possible! And if you want to know more, just drop me an email.

Thanks for reading.

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)


The Viva Prep Handbook