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A small task for viva prep: book an hour or two in your diary to check recent publications. Check journals you have read in the past, ask your supervisors and visit pre-print servers if appropriate to see if there is...
Daily viva help for PhDs
A small task for viva prep: book an hour or two in your diary to check recent publications. Check journals you have read in the past, ask your supervisors and visit pre-print servers if appropriate to see if there is...
If the thought of meeting your examiners and having your viva doesn’t fill you with joy or excitement, what can you do? How can you get yourself to a state where you feel like having your viva? Five quick ideas!...
Survive means manage to keep going in difficult circumstances. Just difficult. Not negative. Not a struggle. I use the definition a lot in my work to emphasise that surviving the viva doesn’t mean the situation is automatically bad or overwhelming,...
No matter how much work you put into your research and thesis, or how much time you spend on viva prep, there’s always something that your examiners could say or ask that you haven’t anticipated. And no matter what they...
You’ve written your thesis, read it in preparation for your viva and maybe made notes on pages. So why would you write anything else about it? Why would you write a summary as part of your viva prep? To gather...
Five years ago, on what would have been my dad’s 70th birthday I published The Knack. It was a personal piece of writing for this blog, but also one with a point: …your PhD is hard, but there are aspects...
What would you change about your viva prep if you could go back and do it over? I was asked this at a recent webinar. I knew immediately what I would change: I would have a mock viva. I definitely...
My PhD research was about something called knot theory. The basic question in this topic can be explained, essentially, as “if you loop up a piece of elasticated string and glue the ends together, can you tell if it’s fundamentally...
The viva is a discussion. It’s not a Q&A. It’s not an interview. It’s not supposed to be combative or about proving who is right or wrong. Remember that your examiners are allowed to have different opinions to you. They...
When you hear lots of different stories about the viva it’s natural to group them together. Short vivas. Long vivas. Tough vivas. Easy vivas. A presentation to start or an opening question to get things going. Lots of questions. Hardly...