Don’t Prepare Monologues
Your examiners are not attending a play. They don’t want you to sit (or stand) and talk at them for hours. They want a conversation. They want you to respond rather than recite. There might be tricky parts of your...
Daily viva help for PhDs
Your examiners are not attending a play. They don’t want you to sit (or stand) and talk at them for hours. They want a conversation. They want you to respond rather than recite. There might be tricky parts of your...
You will survive – manage to keep going in difficult circumstances – because you’ve done that throughout your PhD. You will most likely thrive too – grow, develop and be successful. Prepare rather than perfect. You can get ready for the conversation...
In the viva, no candidate wants to say the wrong thing. No-one wants to misremember a detail or misquote a paper. No-one wants to go blank and say the first thing, the silly thing, the wrong thing. No-one wants to...
We can look at all of the numbers for the viva – pass rates, lengths, percentages of candidates told they’ve passed at the start, correlation of questions and disciplines – and see lots of little details about the general expectations....
Every PhD candidate in their viva is, at some point and in some way, going to need to talk about their contribution. Examiners will raise the topic and the candidate will need to talk about why their research is significant...
I love Arnold Schwarzenegger’s rejection of being described as a “self-made” man. He’s responded to that thought in many interviews and talks but writes emphatically about it in the foreword to Tim Ferriss’s book, Tools of Titans: I am not a...
To be more specific, provided you do the work it’s hard to not be prepared. Viva prep doesn’t need to take a lot of time, maybe twenty or thirty hours in total, and the type of work that helps is...
You’re not the first person to have a viva. You’re not the first person to feel nervous, anxious, worried or afraid. You’re not the first person to worry that you could or should have done more. You’re not the first PhD candidate...
People use lots of names to describe the PhD viva. Viva voce. Thesis defence. Final viva. Thesis examination. The viva. It’s quite common, in my experience, for candidates to capitalise the V in viva! “…my Viva is next month…” Words matter....
The viva is a challenge because you don’t know what will happen. It’s a challenge because you don’t know what your examiners think. It’s a challenge despite the vast majority of candidates passing. It’s a challenge because the outcome matters....