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Month: April 2024

Nathan

What Does It Mean?

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What does this mean? What does that mean? What’s the difference between X and Y?

If there are any terms that you can remember being asked about a lot during your PhD, then take time to refresh your memory before your viva. If there are terms you use regularly while you do your work, be sure that they mean what you think they mean. Be sure that there aren’t edge cases or extra points you’ve forgotten.

You don’t need to know every fact, detail, reference and idea, but take time to unpick what common terms mean, especially if you’ve used them a lot.

Nathan

Personal Statistics

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How do you measure or remind yourself of your confidence?

Do you do that at all?

For a long time I struggled with feeling excessively nervous. A lot of things I read and learned about told me that building up confidence would help: confidence would not get rid of nervousness but it would help to put it into perspective.

For all the little things I tried, I still encountered situations where I felt terrible because of nervousness. The situations – giving a talk, attending a meeting – still went fine, but they were more difficult for me because of how uncomfortable I felt.

A turning point was realising just how much work I had done in the past. If I felt nervous before giving a talk I could remind myself of how many times I had rehearsed it. If I felt nervous before giving one of my regular sessions I could remind myself of how many times I had shared it before and with how many hundreds of researchers.

Over time I realised I was counting many thousands of researchers.

 

I still feel nervous before any session I deliver. That’s OK though. It reminds me that I’m doing something important and I want it to go well.

I now feel confident before any session I deliver. I’m reminded by my numbers: I’ve now delivered over 400 viva help sessions to almost 9000 postgraduate researchers. I’ve published more than 2500 daily posts on this blog. These numbers help remind me of who I am, what I’ve done and what I can do in the current situation.

What stats could you track? What numbers might make a difference to you?

It could be the number of papers you’ve read. It might help to track the number of experiments you’ve run or people you’ve interviewed, depending on your kind of research. Work out the number of days or hours you showed up to do the necessary work of your PhD.

To help your confidence and help yourself find your own meaningful numbers and statistics.

Nathan

Hold On

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If you feel confident in the days leading up to your viva then do what you can to hold on to that feeling. Remind yourself of what you’ve done to come so far. Remind yourself of the difference your work makes.

If you feel certain of what to expect from your viva then hold on to that certainty. Make notes for yourself of what others have told you. Write down what seems most relevant from the regulations.

If you feel ready to talk in your viva then hold on as much as possible. Rehearse for your viva. Read your thesis and write summaries. Keep going with your preparations to keep that feeling alive for yourself.

Hold on. There’s not long to go and not much to do before you finish your PhD.

Nathan

Not Knowing

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The more I do, the more I find I don’t know!

This sentiment was shared by a generous participant at a recent viva help webinar I ran. Before I had a chance to respond the chat was filled with thumbs up emojis, hearts and five people writing “Same!” and “Me too!”

 

A thesis takes years of work. A candidate learns and grows and develops – and discovers that there is still more they don’t know. Despite all the work. More papers. More books. More ideas. More questions and more answers to explore.

Not knowing something might feel pretty bad depending on the day or the situation. The viva is perhaps a singularly uncomfortable environment to realise you don’t know something. The weeks and months leading up to then could be pretty hard too. Knowing you have done so much and knowing that there is so much you still don’t know.

(and knowing, in some cases, that there are things you almost certainly will never know)

 

The more I do, the more I find I don’t know!

If this sounds familiar, focus on the first clause: you’re doing something. You know things. You are making something. You are finding things.

Before you focus on what you don’t know, take a long time to examine, explore and record what you know – and remember that this will be enough for your viva.

Nathan

Schedule Your Prep

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You might not know your viva date at submission. Confirmation could come weeks after you have submitted. In some cases a candidate might only get two weeks warning of a viva date (assuming that the date works for them too).

Sketch out a plan for viva prep at submission. This might have some blanks. It might not have precise dates. But consider how busy you are and what commitments you have already.

When, where and how would you fit in viva preparation?

A schedule could have tasks broken down date by date or be a list of points you have to tackle. Any helpful structure you can give yourself at submission will help you appreciate the scope of what needs to be done, what questions you need to ask yourself and what further planning you need to do.

Then you need to do the work!

Nathan

Friendly Questions

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Around submission time reach out to your friends and colleagues in your department.

For the particular friends who might know a little about your research, ask for time: can they listen to you talk about your work? Would they have an hour in their schedule to get coffee and give you a mini-viva? Or perhaps get a group together and listen to a seminar?

For friends and colleagues who have had their viva, ask for information: what was their viva like? What happened? How did they feel? Consider what you might need to know about to help you get a good sense of what vivas are like or to put your mind at ease. Ask for details.

Who do you know who could help you?

Nathan

Questioning Difficulty

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A simple distinction for the viva: your examiners might have difficult questions for you but they’re not asking them to be difficult.

Difficult questions naturally follow your work. They come from doing something original. They result from writing a book and needing to explore it deeply. They follow the challenges of your research into the particular challenge of your viva.

Neither your external or your internal is purposefully asking difficult questions to make you sweat, to make you worried, to tear your work apart or to bring you down. The viva is not a hazing ritual you have to get through before you’re allowed to call yourself Dr.

Expect difficult questions at your viva – not difficult people.

Nathan

No Shortcuts

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There’s no quick three-step process to getting ready for the viva.

You can’t bypass reading your thesis to refresh your memory.

No-one has invented a 5-minute mock viva that gets you two-hours of practise in 300 seconds.

There are no shortcuts to just doing the work – but the work involved in viva preparation really doesn’t take all that long. Maybe an hour per day for about four weeks leading up to your viva could be enough, even with taking a day off here and there.

It’s not nothing, but it’s a lot less than the hundreds of days and thousands of hours invested in your PhD up to submission. It’s a little more work to help you be ready for the particular challenge of your viva.

And given what’s at stake, why would anyone want a shortcut to being ready for their viva?

Nathan

Better Questions

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It’s not uncommon or irrational for a PhD candidate to ask:

  • How long will my viva be?
  • What do I do if I go blank?
  • How do I get out of tricky questions?
  • Is it better to have a morning or afternoon viva?
  • How much time is given for minor corrections?

These are natural questions to have in mind. A supervisor or a friend might be able to offer advice or even a definitive answer for some of them.

These are natural questions for a candidate to ask of others, but it’s better to reflect on questions like:

  • What am I doing to get ready?
  • What makes my thesis contribution valuable?
  • What do the exam regulations say?
  • Who can help me be prepared?
  • What makes me a capable researcher?

Worry, concern and not knowing lead to questions about the viva and preparation.

There are often better questions to consider than the ones which first come to mind.

Nathan

What Comes Next

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“Good luck for your viva next week! Don’t worry, it’s not the end of the world!”

It’s not the end of the world – it’s the end of your PhD.

Perhaps, after so long spent researching and working on something, and even with the happy prospect of future plans and new horizons, a little of the worry and nervousness for the viva and the end of the PhD comes from just being worried for what comes next.

So make plans. Write lists. Draw out what you’ve done and what matters. Find some comfort at the thought of finishing something good. Reflect on what you’re carrying with you into the next stage of you.

Nerves and worry are normal as you finish anything. Nerves and worry are normal as you come to finish your PhD. It’s not the end of the world but the viva is a big part of the end of your PhD.

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