Four Mini-Vivas To Kickstart Your Viva Prep

A year ago I first shared 7776 Mini-Vivas, a resource to create useful summaries, reflections and conversations as part of viva prep. I love seeing people share the resource, and I continue to tinker with it to find other ways to share it.

Today, I’m simply presenting four mini-vivas for you to use. You could write the questions out on a sheet of paper and give yourself thirty minutes to an hour to write down some notes. You could give them to a friend to structure a conversation. You could record yourself talking about them and listen back afterwards to reflect.

All four could help you to reflect on what you’ve done for your PhD and what it means – two areas of conversation that are sure to come up in your viva.

Mini-Viva 1

• What is your main research question?
• How do you know your methods are valid?
• How is your work related to your examiners’ research?
• What questions have you been asked about your work previously?
• What’s the impact of your work?

Mini-Viva 2

• What are the three brightest parts of your research?
• What influenced your methodology?
• How did existing literature in the field influence you?
• How can you be sure of your conclusions?
• What do you hope others will take away from your thesis?

Mini-Viva 3

• How would you define your thesis contribution?
• Where did you find support in the existing research for your methods?
• What were some of the challenges you overcame during your PhD?
• How would you summarise your main results?
• What publications do you hope to produce?

Mini-Viva 4

• Why did you want to pursue your research?
• How would you describe your methodology?
• How did your supervisor help shape your research?
• How can you be sure of your conclusions?
• What are you taking away from your PhD?

Remember to leave some time to come back to your reflections, whether written or recorded, to review what you think and see if more ideas come. You could also ask yourself “Why?” after most of these questions to prompt deeper reflection.

There’s another 7772 possible mini-vivas from the resource – you probably don’t need to use all of them as part of your viva prep!