Use The Right Tools

We use tools to help ourselves.

Screwdrivers come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Saws vary depending on their purpose and the materials they’re designed to cut. Hammers can be used to assemble or destroy.

Tools are useful to make or maintain, to remedy small problems or big situations.

So what tools are you taking to your viva?

Perhaps you have something physical to show your examiners, but more likely you’ll be demonstrating intellectual tools that you have constructed over the course of your PhD.

You’ll show your knowledge. You’ll share your understanding. You’ll demonstrate your capacity for thinking like a researcher in your field.

These are the tools you need to do well. They’ve helped you make the research in your thesis and can now help you to make good on that promise at your viva.

Don’t forget that tools need maintaining too – viva prep is essential for sharpening yourself!