Daily viva help for PhDs
In the viva, thesis defence doesn’t mean your work is being attacked.
Think of it as support: you can support something without it being in danger.
Think about how your words can support your research. Think about what you can do before and in the viva to help your work shine.
If it helps, why wouldn’t you have something lucky with you in the viva?
My good day socks were a story I told myself for years – “wear these socks and it will be a good day” – my viva, difficult meetings, the first time I ran workshops. There were so many situations where it made me feel better. I know people who wore a particular outfit to the viva because it was like armour to them, or a superhero costume. It added that extra something that helps them to feel better.
If you tell yourself the story that these clothes, this teddy, this piece of jewellery or whatever will help then you make sure to have them.
But it’s only a story – and there’s another one nearly reaching a conclusion.
You showed up. And kept showing up. You did the work and you did it well. You’ve written a thesis, and know your stuff. It’s not make-believe.
A few years ago I stopped telling myself the story of my good day socks, because I didn’t need it any more. If you do, that’s fine: good luck charms can help and help is good.
But don’t forget the other story: you did the work and you did it well. You can do well in the viva too.
You can be enthusiastic for the viva and also feel nervous about it too. They’re not mutually exclusive states. Rather than think of ways to combat nervousness, could you think of ways to boost your enthusiasm?
To my mind, there’s lots of reasons to be enthusiastic about the viva.
It’s the final test! You’ve written a thesis! You are talented to be there!
Of course, I have a different perspective on the viva. The reasons I can think of to be enthusiastic might or might not help you.
So what would?
I’ve wanted to make a viva-related game for a long time, but whenever I get close to an idea it always slides away while I’m thinking about it.
This is the closest I’ve got: a game-like resource for one or more people to help reflect on research and the thesis in advance of the viva.
Want to have a Mini-Viva? That’s what I’m calling a short reflection on your research or practice for the viva using useful questions.
There are two main sections to this resource: The Questions and Ways To Play. I’ve organised five lists of six questions. All are either typical of questions that come up in vivas, or useful to reflect on in advance of the viva. The basic idea is to take one question from each list to create a Mini-Viva.
You could use a standard six-sided die or pick a number from 1 to 6 to choose from the lists in The Questions. I’ve included five Ways To Play, ideas on how to use this resource both by yourself and with other people. With five sets of questions and six choices for each there are 7776 Mini-Vivas possible – perhaps don’t do all of them during your preparations!
I hope you find this useful! Scroll to the end for some Final Thoughts on this resource.
Question 1
Question 2
Question 3
Question 4
Question 5
Solo, Pencil & Paper: Divide a sheet of paper into five sections. Roll a 6-sided die for each question or choose one that feels appropriate. Write each question into their appropriate space. Spend some time reflecting on each and then writing notes into each space.
Solo, Record & Reflect: Use an audio recording app or software to record your answers. Roll a 6-sided die for each question as you make the recording, so the question isn’t completely expected, or simply choose as you go. Spend as much time as you like answering each question. Leave the recording for a day or two, then listen back to it and reflect on your responses. See what you think about them now.
With A Little Help, Scripted: Divide a sheet of paper into five sections. Roll a 6-sided die for each question or choose one that feels appropriate. Write each question into their appropriate space. Give this to a friend to ask you the questions; ask them to make notes in each space. Afterwards have a chat about what you each think of the experience.
With A Little Help, Unscripted: Give the question list to a friend. Ask them to roll a 6-sided die for each question or choose one that feels appropriate, without consulting you. Talk with them for each question they choose to ask you. Ask them to make notes if they’re happy. Afterwards have a chat about what you each think of the experience.
With A Little Help, Freeform: Give the question list to a friend. Ask them to use the questions to steer a reflective conversation with the goal of helping you think and talk about your thesis research. Ask them to make notes if they’re happy; you might benefit from making notes as well. Afterwards have a chat about what you each think of the experience.
7776 Mini-Vivas is a work-in-progress, albeit one that I’m happy to share and for it to be shared. I think there’s a nice structure underneath this for short, useful practice and viva prep. Perhaps there’s a better way to arrange the information? Or maybe it’s clear as it is.
My near term plan is to create a separate page for this resource, possibly with some download-and-print pdfs, maybe even a folding Pocketmod edition like The tiny book of viva prep (see here). I have more ideas of what I might do with this resource – but I’d love to hear your feedback and ideas for other questions, other Ways To Play or ways to implement the resource. Do send me an email or tweet at me with your suggestions!
If you play with 7776 Mini-Vivas I really hope it’s useful 🙂
About six weeks ago I watched as a dozen children almost went to war in my living room. The reason?
Pass The Parcel.
It was my daughter’s fifth birthday party, and she’d insisted on playing a lot of games, including Pass The Parcel. We decided it would be like Pass The Parcel from our childhoods, with a single prize in the centre, and no little prize with every layer.
Well.
The kids were in uproar. We told them there was just one in the centre, but they were confused. Wh- Why?! Where were the little prizes? Then I want to win the one in the centre! They were desperate to hold on to the parcel in case this layer was the layer. They stopped having fun. We thought it would be alright, they would see the fun in taking part, taking a layer off getting closer to the prize, but they didn’t. Wanting the prize was too much for them. In the end, we fudged the final round so a particularly desperate child won.
(I feared tears and physical violence if they didn’t)
I was thinking about this game of Pass The Parcel the other day and was reminded of my PhD, and research more generally.
Sometimes, you only get to tear the paper off; sometimes, you don’t get to the big answer, the thing you were looking for. You get closer, but not all the way to the prize.
And that’s fine, you learn, you grow and you move everyone in your field forward.
It can be hard though, doing a PhD, writing a thesis, preparing for the viva, to see it that way. It might be true, but will your examiners see it that way? Or will they focus solely on why you didn’t get to the end goal? Examiners appreciate that not every research journey ends at the point one might want. They’ll have the experience to recognise what you’ve done if you don’t reach the point you wanted.
Your job, if this is your situation, is to be able to talk about how far you went. How close you came. What the different layers you tore off were. How you might have done it differently. And what other steps someone might need to take to reach the prize.
One of the neatest pieces of shorthand I learned in my many mathematical years.
“The Sum of” and then an expression or a concept. In simple terms, add up everything that looks like this.
You might have some lower or upper bounds, you might have very specific things you want to add. If you’re lucky there could be a formula that represents what that sum is (I used to love working out those). I use Σ when trying to decide whether or not a crazy idea is viable financially.
A PhD candidate is the sum of their experiences. “Σ everything you’ve done” – there are lots of little formulas we could create…
There’s around 6000 of those hours. The viva is not a one-off event, it’s the next one that you’re going to succeed at. Add up all of the days that you’ve spent getting to the viva. All of the good things you’ve done. All of the less good stuff that helped you learn.
Σ all these things equals someone meant to be at the viva.
I was halfway through a short workshop on project planning. I was sharing a process researchers could use to outline their projects. At the coffee break a young researcher came to me and politely explained he was going to leave before we started the second half. “This is all very interesting,” he said, “But I just want a silver bullet. I don’t want a process, I want something that solves it all for me.”
I thanked him for coming, told him of course he should go if he felt that way – but also shared that in my experience there was no such thing as a silver bullet for project planning, no magic thing that just sorted it out.
Convenience is nice, but there aren’t a lot of silver bullets lying around. Sometimes you can lean on advice or experience, but more often than not you just have to follow a process.
There’s a real lack of silver bullets when it comes to the viva.
There’s no silver bullet for prep. Nothing you can load up that answers every question. No silver bullet for confidence as you walk in.
But then there were no silver bullets to get you from the start of your PhD to submission and you did that. You don’t need them anyway. You needed time and effort and ideas and talent to get your thesis done and you did. You have all of those things when you prepare for the viva, and in the viva too.
You don’t need a silver bullet now.
You just need you.
Every computer I’ve ever owned, every phone, every console has glitched at some point. From the blue screen of death to Netflix stalling, Firefox not responding and Open Office encountering an error, sometimes things go wrong. It just happens; reboot, restart and then things work. They work correctly 99% of the time…
…just like you. It’s understandable to worry about freezing, going blank or saying “I don’t know” in the viva. It’s important, you want it to go well. If you glitch then the solution is the same as your favourite expensive electronic device.
Reboot, restart and things will be fine:
Glitches don’t happen all the time. When they do, you can take steps to overcome them.
If you glitch in the viva, you can do something about it.
The internal examiner dabbed the red away from his lips and paused before settling his stone-grey eyes on the shivering candidate.
“How,” he began, his voice like the echo of a whisper, “How… Hmm… How did you arrive at this choice of methodology?”
A look of pain passed the candidate’s face, a long-held fear finally realised! A moment of sheer terror, a buried tension risen to the surface like a zombie erupting from a grave. No choice, no alternative, but to state with quivering voice:
“I…! I did it… Because my supervisor told me to!”
And with that they fainted.
“Pity,” said the internal, taking another red sip from their chalice, “I had such high hopes for this one.”
A snarling from the external examiner’s secure crate reverberated around the seminar room.
“Well, quite,” said the internal, “A perfectly acceptable answer. And I really wanted to know why they had settled on Magnusson’s ‘Treatise on Ancient Awakenings’ as well…”
It’s possible you’ve heard of a real viva horror story. I know people have negative experiences, but it’s not the majority of experiences, not even close. And they don’t “just happen”. There are always reasons why: problems with the thesis, a research issue that was overlooked, a breakdown between supervisor and candidate.
Good horror stories, the really scary ones, have no reasons.
The Thing is just there in the ice, waiting.
The zombies march, and we don’t know how they came to be.
Dracula is.
There are reasons why you did a PhD. Reasons why you’ve got this far. Reasons why your thesis is done. Reasons why you’ll pass your viva. You can be scared by viva horror stories, but you can always unpick why they happened that way. You can be nervous in advance of your own viva, but it’s possible to unpick where that fear comes from. What drives it, what makes it worse, and maybe what could make it better.
My thesis was full of codewords: technical terms and jargon that would have been tough for the uninitiated to break.
Genus 2 manifold. Unoriented link. Plait presentation.
How coded is your thesis? Jargon can save on words and be a shorthand for precision. It can also keep people out – maybe even you!
Check your codewords during your viva preparation. Make a short glossary to be sure of your definitions. Decode tricky terms in the margins. Stick in Post-it Notes with concise explanations.
Unpicking the meaning of words can help you think about how to explain them even better.