You Are Here

Month: February 2024

Nathan

An Extra Day

Daily Post

If you had an extra day to get ready for your viva, what would you do?

Would you spend a chunk of time reading your thesis again, just in case you missed something?

Perhaps you’d feel better if you sat down and talked with your supervisor some more.

Or you could consider gathering stationery and going over your thesis pages one more time just in case you can add something helpful.

 

One more day is a lot of time and you could complete a lot of helpful work – but given everything else you’ve done during your PhD and after submission, maybe you could just take the extra day as a chance to rest?

Nathan

Reward Your Progress

Daily Post

Viva prep is a necessary part of getting ready. No tasks are particularly difficult, but if you are already tired, busy or stressed with regular work and life, then they can seem like more chores to get done.

There are lots of things you could do to help you stay motivated:

  • Keep a to do list to cross off and show your progress;
  • Ask friends to keep you accountable by checking in with you;
  • Reward yourself for getting things done.

The last suggestion might be really helpful. Can you incentivise your own progress? What could you set up as a small treat for reading your thesis? Or for completing a mock viva? Would an extra break be enough or do you need something more tangible?

It’s not for everyone, but if you need the motivation to help with your viva prep, consider what you can do to reward your progress.

Nathan

Expect The Expected

Daily Post

Every viva is unique but no viva should be a great unknown.

Regulations and stories of viva experiences give a shape to the general process; departmental and disciplinary practices give some fine detail to specific viva norms. Taken together these give a general pattern of expectations: you can’t know exactly what will happen, but you can imagine something that the viva will tend towards.

Every viva is different, so you can expect the unexpected – a unique experience – but you can also expect your viva to be like others you’ve heard about in your preparations. You won’t know which details will follow the pattern exactly, or how closely, but unless your situation is very different from every other PhD candidate you can expect your viva to be similar to many past stories.

Every viva is unique but you can expect yours to follow expectations.

Nathan

Help If You Can

Daily Post

If a friend or colleague asks for help with their viva prep then assist them if you can. Ask what they need and help with their request as much as you’re able.

Perhaps they need to know what to expect from a viva. Share your experience or share what you’ve heard from trusted sources. Point them in the right direction for more help.

If they ask you to listen or to ask them questions then try to be there for them. Do this regardless of whether you’ve had a viva. When you’re asked to listen or discuss, help flows both ways. You learn while you offer support: the experience you get being in conversation helps you too.

There are valid reasons to say no to helping – you are busy or you really feel like you’re not the right person – but if you can, help your friends when they need someone.

Nathan

A Few Random Posts

Daily Post

Every page on the Viva Survivors site has a little link in the sidebar that says

Click here for a random post of viva help!

If you use it then you’ll find yourself reading one of (currently) 2467 daily viva help posts.

If you have a specific topic or problem you’re looking to read about then the search bar or selecting a tag beneath a post will be a better way to find help. But if you just want to read a helpful thought related to the viva, the random post link is probably the way to go. Here are five posts that the link just gave me:

  • Not-To-Do – what would it be helpful to avoid in viva prep?
  • Scrawl – thinking about thesis annotation.
  • What If I Fail? – the big question in the minds of many worried candidates.
  • Breathe – an encouragement to relax a little.
  • Defending Your Work – what it means to really defend without being defensive.

A few random posts can offer a lot of help – and I’ve worked to make sure that there’s a lot more than a few random posts on Viva Survivors.

If you’re looking for help, you’ll find some here 🙂

Nathan

Missing Nothing

Daily Post

Between submission and your viva, take an hour or two to see if any recent, relevant papers have been published that you haven’t noticed while you’ve been busy.

You’ve not missed them though. They’re still there. You can read them now.

It could be that one or more of them has something that you could have included in your thesis. But you didn’t. You’ve not missed it. You don’t need it now.

A thesis always has a line drawn under it in some way: I studied and worked up to this point. There’s always more published and always new connections to be made.

But not now. This far. No further.

You check for recent, relevant papers for yourself, to make sure your personal knowledge is more full; you don’t look for more references or new ideas to add to your thesis.

You’ll probably have corrections but those aside your thesis is complete.

Nathan

Good Responses

Daily Post

Some of your viva questions will have great answers.

You’ll know something for certain, either because of your reading or your research. In that situation, when asked you will be able to give an answer.

You won’t know in advance which questions will lead to that in the viva. In fact, aside from some good guesses or small hopes, you won’t know any of the questions or comments that your examiners will ask or offer at your viva.

You might not have an answer standing by but you can always be ready to respond. Through practice and preparation, no matter the question or comment, you can:

  • Listen carefully to what is being said.
  • Pause and think carefully.
  • Make a note if needed.
  • Check your thesis for information if that will help.
  • Choose your words carefully and offer a good response.

Some viva questions or comments won’t have answers. Some don’t need them. Your examiners are looking to you to offer a good response by engaging with their words and doing your best.

Great is great but good is good enough. Engage with your examiners’ questions; offer the best responses you can and you’ll succeed at your viva.

Nathan

Steering Towards Confidence

Daily Post

To feel confident for your viva you have to do the work: you have to do the research needed, write your thesis, develop yourself and really realise what all of that means.

Confidence isn’t a destination on your PhD journey. It’s a feeling you have to find through the work that you do. Your actions lead you to feeling confident (or not) and so you have to see what works and what doesn’t. Does your confidence grow through simply doing things, like giving talks or publishing papers? Or do you need to reflect more on how you feel afterwards, perhaps carefully unpicking what happened?

Will simple things like considering what you wear and how you explain things help? Will small things like a music playlist or some other helpful placebo steer you towards feeling confident?

Confidence isn’t a destination. It’s a feeling you can find. Keep going, keep doing, keep thinking and you can steer yourself towards feeling good, both for your viva and more generally.

Nathan

The Viva Help Parcel

Update

Viva Survivors has almost 2500 posts of viva help. There’s also the old podcast archive, resources and more. If you need viva help there is a lot of it freely available on this site! I’ve created a few publications too:

  • Keep Going – A Viva Survivors Anthology was first published in May 2022 and is my first big collection of Viva Survivors posts, the best of five years of the daily blog.
  • 101 Steps To A Great Viva is the zine that I Kickstarted last summer. Surprisingly it has 101 steps to a great viva! 101 practical steps any candidate can take to help get ready for their viva.

Following a few recent requests I’ve made my last print copies of both Keep Going – A Viva Survivors Anthology and 101 Steps To A Great Viva available for sale as a bundle that I’ll send to your letterbox 🙂

Front cover of "Keep Going - A Viva Survivors Anthology" by Nathan Ryder. Shows five postgraduate researchers sat around a table doing various research-related tasks. Cover by Maria Stoian

If you want print copies of these two helpful viva publications then go to this link – Viva Help Parcel – and look at the images and description to see if they might be for you. I suppose the questions to consider are:

  • Do you want a book of 150+ blog posts from the Viva Survivors blog?
  • Do you want a zine with 101 practical actions to help your viva?
  • And do you want both of these sent to you through the post?

If you answer yes to any of these then please check out the Viva Help Parcel, available with UK shipping included for £20. There are very limited quantities available and I have no current plans to produce more. Thank you for reading!

Cover of 101 Steps To A Great Viva

And PS: If you’re looking for ebooks or pdfs then you can find those here! 🙂

Nathan

Viva Prep & Getting Ready

Daily Post

Viva prep starts at submission. You can do helpful tasks before then like searching for examination regulations or sketching out a prep plan, but the actual work of viva prep doesn’t start until after your thesis is submitted. Up to that point your focus has to be on finishing your thesis.

Getting ready for your viva, however, starts on day one of your PhD – or even earlier. From day one you are on a path that is helping you grow, nurturing your research and leading you to being a capable, knowledgeable researcher. Talent and expertise grow as you do the work and stay committed, helping you get closer and closer to being ready.

 

There’s prep to do after submission because the viva is a particular challenge.

Remember that you’ve been getting ready for your viva for a much, much longer time than the weeks between submission and your viva.

1 2 3