A Break Day
It’s not just a day off. It’s an opportunity to tell yourself that you’re doing the right thing by having a day off. It’s a time to tell yourself that you need to rest too. It’s hopefully space to really...
Daily viva help for PhDs
It’s not just a day off. It’s an opportunity to tell yourself that you’re doing the right thing by having a day off. It’s a time to tell yourself that you need to rest too. It’s hopefully space to really...
Your thesis didn’t just appear. You did the work. You made something good. But how did you do it? And why did it need doing? How did you find a way to get your results? And why were they good...
After posts about superheroes, Doctor Who and other science-fictiony things over the last few years, it’s probably no surprise that I’m an enormous fan of the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It’s not an understatement to say that I LOVE the film:...
The viva is all about talking! You have to talk! You have to answer questions! You have to get your ideas across! But you also have to listen, you have to think, you have to take your time, you might...
It’s a good question to ask about a thesis or a PhD, but a hard one to answer. There are lots of possible factors. How much does your supervisor think you need to do? How much time can you spend?...
A while back I published a post, The Fourth Option, which summarised how candidates could respond to tricky questions in the viva. This was specifically about situations where a question seems hard to respond to, or even perhaps seems unfair, but...
You wouldn’t buy your viva from a supermarket, assuming that the viva was a physical thing you could buy. You wouldn’t find it by wandering up and down aisles, past eighteen brands of pasta sauce and ten kinds of toilet...
It’s easy to tie oneself up in knots about what to expect in the viva. There are simple expectations to hold on to though. Listen to advice and stories from your peers. Appreciate the range of experiences and the common...
Or, Star Wars and the Viva… I’ve loved Star Wars my whole life. I ran around playgrounds as a child being a Jedi. I grew up into a teenager who knew The Empire Strikes Back backwards. I was a 20-something who...
At the end of one of the last seminars I delivered before social distancing and lockdown, a PhD candidate came up to me with a strange smile on his face. He was generous, thanked me for the session, told me...