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Nathan

Six Thoughts On Six Years

Daily Post

Six years of the Viva Survivors daily blog.

Wow. Time flies when you’re planning, writing and publishing an original and helpful blog post every day!

What stands out to me from the last six years?

  1. As time goes by I see this resource I’ve made as valuable for PGRs, but it’s also incredibly valuable to me as a way to practice, refine and explore ideas. I’d recommend a regular writing practice to anyone.
  2. For all the changes of the last few years, the viva – preparation, expectations, worries and problems – doesn’t seem to have changed. Not really.
  3. The mini-vivas resource I made remains one of my favourite viva prep ideas!
  4. For all the prep someone can do before the viva, perhaps the most valuable thing they can do is build their confidence – centred on the work they have done and the success they’ve found along the way.
  5. Publishing a daily blog isn’t “hard” but it is work. It doesn’t get easier, it evolves and stays challenging.
  6. I want to encourage more people to subscribe than currently do. I’ve been told many times that receiving an email every day with a little viva help or encouragement has been great. I want to find helpful ways to encourage PGRs to sign-up!

Onwards and upwards. No plan to stop, no need to pause. Thank you for reading, if this is your first post or your five-hundredth. There’s a lot of help here, if you need it.

Thank you!

 

And as a little bonus for today, links to the first and anniversary posts from the last six years!

  1. No Accident – April 18th 2017
  2. One Year Later – April 18th 2018
  3. The Culture Around Vivas – April 18th 2019
  4. Three Years On – April 18th 2020
  5. Four Years – April 18th 2021
  6. A Happy Accident – April 18th 2022

I wonder what I’ll share next year?

Nathan

A Happy Accident

Daily Post

I started the daily blog five years ago today by publishing No Accident.

It was a short post to start an ongoing daily blog! I wanted to begin by exploring what gets a postgraduate researcher from the start to the end of their PhD. In the last line I clumsily expressed a simple truth about nerves and the viva:

It’s understandable if you are nervous, but it’s no accident that you’ve got this far. Keep going.

I meant that it wasn’t only luck. The outcome of a viva and a PhD doesn’t depend on an accident of any kind. A person can have good fortune but only when they do the work and that works out for them.

I’m sure many postgraduate researchers, even given the last two years or so, feel fortunate at times. They do an uncertain experiment that works out. A resource arrives when it is most needed. An opportunity you just seem to thankfully stumble into. A happy accident, maybe you are the right person in the right place at the right time, but still you have worked to put yourself in that place and time.

Over the last five years I have been very grateful for everything that writing this daily blog has brought my way, for all the things that I have stumbled into! I’m thankful for the funny looks from people who don’t get it; strange looks from people who do get it but think it’s kind of weird to do; grateful emails from people who have been helped by one or more posts.

I’m very thankful to Nathan-in-2017 for following the idea of a daily blog and for all other iterations of me over the last five years who kept going.

If you find yourself encountering a happy accident situation, recognise and remember the work that you’ve done. Be grateful when your hard work pays off.

Use all of that to keep going.