No Need For Luck
You have to have a lot for your viva. You need some research, developed over several years or more. You need a thesis, written to an appropriate standard. You need one or more supervisors to help along the way. You...
Daily viva help for PhDs
You have to have a lot for your viva. You need some research, developed over several years or more. You need a thesis, written to an appropriate standard. You need one or more supervisors to help along the way. You...
Three or more years of research and writing. Two to four weeks of preparation time. One day with a challenge. Put the viva in the right perspective.
To prepare for the viva well it helps to do the right things. You don’t need to cover your thesis in notes and extra scribbles in every margin. Be targeted to make a better version of your thesis. You don’t...
That’s the time after your viva, after corrections, after your final thesis submission but before you actually graduate with your PhD. Are you a Doctor at that point? Technically no, but you might not let that stop you from changing...
There are lots of questions you could be asked at your viva, including questions you’ve never been asked before! But by the time you get there you will have had lots of practise responding to questions, certainly enough to do...
If before your viva you feel an abundance of nervousness, then you have to look a little and find reasons to feel confident. Confidence doesn’t eliminate nerves, but it does help to put those sorts of feelings into perspective. Nervousness...
I’ve written before about INTRO, a neat acronym for structuring the start of a presentation: Interest: start by sharing something that will grab the audience’s attention. Need: say why what you’re going to talk about is important. Title: share the...
Outside of ghost stories and horror movies, there’s not a lot to be scared of on Halloween. The frights are all make believe, costume and shadows serving to send shivers down our spines. For a moment, perhaps, we feel a...
You need both candidate and thesis to be good for a PhD. Your examiners need to ask you – the candidate – about both in the viva. What’s your thesis’ contribution? How did you do it? And what can you do...
Between submission and the viva you might spot some changes you want to make in your thesis. Perhaps you see a typo that has to be amended, a sentence that could be simpler or a diagram that’s just not right....