Your Recipe For Success
“I want some of Daddy’s bread!” The bread I bake is a real winner in our house. It’s been refined over a hundred loaves and several years working at it. It’s a combination of ingredients and technique: from the ratios...
January 2021
Confidence From Your Supervisors
Feedback and praise can help build confidence. Your supervisors could be the best people to boost you before your viva. You have to pick your questions to be as helpful to you as possible. Don’t ask them how you could...
Minor
Most candidates get minor corrections as a result of the viva. I’ve talked with plenty of candidates who worry about what this might mean for them. Words that correspond with minor in the thesaurus: …inconsequential, unimportant, lesser, slight, trivial, small-fry,...
Do More
Viva prep is more. More reading to help you remember and recall what you need. More writing to help you bring everything together. More thinking to help you figure out that you’re ready. But, for all of these and everything...
On The Clock
Checking the time while you’re in the viva won’t help. Most vivas, based on all the conversations I’ve had over the last decade, seem to be in the two- to three-hour range. That knowledge can help you to prepare a...
Bottlenecks
When you plan your viva prep, look for things that could slow your progress. Creating summaries might not be rewarding unless you’ve read your thesis first. Anticipating examiner questions won’t be possible until after you’ve learned about their research. Building...
Imperfect Prep
Your prep will be imperfect. Getting ready for the viva, there’s no way to account for every bit of information you might need. You can’t anticipate every question you could conceivably be asked by your examiners. Your prep is built...
Unhelpful Things…
…to say to friends who have their viva coming up: “Good luck!” “Don’t worry!” “You’ll be fine, nearly no-one fails!” Better things to say include: “You’re talented, don’t forget!” “What can I do to help?” “How are you doing?” And...
Rose-tinted Reflections
I have fond memories of my PhD, but also a background feeling that it could have been so much more than it was. I could have been more pro-active; I realised quite late that I could set my own directions...
The Supporting Skeleton
For a long time I’ve made the following viva prep suggestion in seminars: Consider writing an edited bibliography. If your bibliography is a body of work that supports your thesis then an edited bibliography is the skeleton of that body,...