Daily viva help for PhDs
Ask your supervisor about the best parts of your work.
Ask friends and colleagues about the best parts of their vivas.
Look to your graduate school or doctoral college for helpful resources for viva prep.
Look to friends and family for kind words and help in making a good space to do your viva prep.
Find kind words to encourage yourself: you’re almost there.
Find encouragement for your viva where you can. There’s a lot in the people around you, and a lot in you as well.
When you come to plan your viva prep consider what you want to have and how you want to feel when you’ve finished the work.
Whatever your responses are, they can guide you into thinking about what you will do, how you will do it and what you are ultimately aiming for.
What do you want to have done? How do you want to feel?
If you have any worries or concerns about your viva then take steps to address them.
It sounds like really obvious advice, right?
But I talk to hundreds and hundreds of PhD candidates every year who are worried about their viva. They aren’t sure what to expect. They worry about technical aspects of their research. Some are afraid of meeting their examiners.
And for some reason they keep hold of those worries rather than take actions to work past them.
I love helping people, but for their own sake, I do wish for candidates to realise that they can find help or release worry sooner. Ask your supervisor. Check the regulations. Do something rather than hold on to worry.
If you have a worry about your viva, don’t let it fester. Don’t let it become something bigger than it needs to be. If you need to know something or you aren’t sure then take steps.
By all means ask for advice – ask me! – but take steps rather than just worry.
As you prepare for your viva, always ask for help if you need it. Ask your supervisor for their advice or guidance, ask your friends about their vivas and ask your family and friends to support you as you get ready.
While you’re in the viva, always ask your examiners if something is unclear. Ask them to rephrase a question, ask for more information and ask for their opinion if you really want to know.
As you get ready, always ask yourself how you’re feeling. Ask and reflect on whether or not you’re moving in the right direction, ask yourself if you need to do something more than your plans and consider whether you need to do anything else to build yourself up.
And again, while you’re in the viva, always ask for a break if you need one. Ask yourself to breathe. Ask yourself to take it one question at a time. And ask yourself to be kind to yourself in those hours, if you’re nervous or stressed or uncertain.
A lot of viva worries come from not knowing what to expect – so find out more.
Read the regulations. Ask your supervisors. Talk to friends, talk to post-docs, talk to people who have been down the path to the viva before and succeeded.
Check online. Read a blog or two. Listen to a couple of podcasts. Explore the many resources produced by your institution and others.
It’s not wrong to be worried about the viva. There’s work to do and academic culture makes the viva seem a bit daunting.
There’s a little mystery in the process and what to expect, but a wealth of information in so many places that can help take away any worries you have – or at the very least help you to figure out what you can do to beat those worries back.
If you feel worried about the viva, go find out more.
During my PhD I came across the Mathematics Genealogy Project: an attempt to explore the family tree of mathematicians going back hundreds and hundreds of years.
Maybe you have something similar in your discipline or maybe you have a general appreciation that you are part of a tradition: your work continues to build on the past ideas, research and achievements of other dedicated humans. It’s nice to think about and can be very helpful to reflect on where your work comes from as you get ready for the viva.
Don’t forget you have academic siblings today too. There are many people around you who can help you to get ready for your viva, either by helping you practically, sharing information or simply being there. Make sure you ask for support from people who are really well-placed to help.
When you’re getting ready for your viva ask people who know about vivas. Get specific help rather than general impressions.
When you’re getting ready ask people who know you for help. Ask friends about their experiences and for a little of their time. Ask your supervisors to give you their considered thoughts about your work and about the viva itself.
When getting ready ask your institution for support. Ask them for the regulations, check what things mean and learn who to talk to in case anything goes wrong.
Above all, ask the right questions of the right people. Look around widely for support, but ask people you can trust first: you can trust them either because they know you or they know what you need to know.
You’re not alone as you prepare for your viva. Your are part of a research community: your department, your research network and even random people you know on social media. Every member of this community can play a part in helping you.
You’re the only person who can go to your viva and meet with your examiners. It’s your viva – but before then there is a lot of support available to you.
And after your viva you have the opportunity to support others in your community too.
When you start to prepare for your viva, make a list of what you will need to feel prepared. Ask yourself:
With all of these questions responded to and items listed, you have a checklist. The more you mark off, the closer you are to being sure you’re ready. Even if you can’t get everything – say, if you can’t have a mock viva – if you manage most things then you can feel pretty confident for the big day.
What will it take for you to feel ready? Make a list and do as much as you can.
For over a decade Viva Survivors has been geared towards the PhD viva and helping people get ready, but PhD candidates aren’t the only postgraduate researchers who have a viva.
What if you’re doing an EngD or an EdD? Or an MPhil? Or an MScR? Or you’re researching towards another collection of letters?
How do the hundreds of thousands of words on Viva Survivors (and the resources, and the podcast archive) apply when you’re not doing a PhD viva? What changes? What stays the same?
I don’t know – or at least, I don’t know everything.
The basic principles of viva prep hold. The ideas of getting ready and building confidence based on your success and development hold.
But the regulations will differ, at least a little. Viva expectations might differ because the general experience of an MScR viva, for example, might not be quite the same as a PhD viva.
But still there is help out there and on Viva Survivors.
Whatever your research degree, read the regulations for your institution. Whatever you’re working towards, talk to people who have gone on the journey before you and ask them questions about what their viva was like. Take time to think about what you need to do to prepare, plan your prep and then get it done.
Whatever you do, ask for help. Whatever you do, take time to get ready. Whatever you do, share what’s helped with others when you’re done.
Then go on and do something even better, because your research degree is only one step in the journey.