Daily viva help for PhDs
Thousands of hours of work, spread out over hundreds and hundreds of days.
How much thinking? How much practical work? How much reading?
Now all squashed into several chapters, a few hundred pages maybe.
Your thesis is dense.
In preparation for your viva you need to dig in to it.
Read what you wrote. Reflect on what it means. Review what you need to so you feel ready.
And remember that dense substances are often very valuable.
Make a list of everything you’ve done that makes you feel proud. Think about all of the achievements in your PhD. Reflect on why they matter to you.
Within that list you’ll find the strengths of your work. You’ll see your research’s contributions. You made those contributions.
Make your list. Reflect on all you’ve done. Think about why you could be confident to meet the challenges of your viva.
Viva Survivors Summer Sabbatical: I’m taking July, August and September off from new writing to concentrate on other creative projects, so will be sharing a post from the archives every day throughout those months. Today’s post was originally published on March 2nd 2019.
Highlighter pens can be a useful part of a viva prep toolkit.
You can use one colour to show key references and another to make essential information stand out. You could add a colourful edge to specific pages or mark the start of chapters. It may not be common, but if it meets your needs you could even keep track of typos and future edits with a careful colour selection.
Highlighters are a simple way to show something important but also a clever reminder that you have work in your thesis that matters. You draw attention to what needs to be seen or shared.
As well as edits, references and information, consider using highlighters for the highlights: what do you need to be able to see at a glance to share with your examiners?
In preparation for your viva, take some time to reflect on why your work makes a difference. Unpick the ideas that matter, reflect on why your work is valuable.
Your examiners want to talk to you about why your research is a significant, original contribution – and so you have to be ready to talk, discuss, think, reflect and respond.
Between submission and your viva:
Remember that your work matters. It must – or you wouldn’t have come as far as you have on this journey.
The topic of what makes your thesis a significant, original contribution is going to come up in your viva.
Your examiners are not going to simply ask “What makes your work significant? What makes it original?” Reflecting on different questions can help you be prepared to respond when the topic comes up with whatever questions your examiners use.
Think, write notes or talk with others about the following:
Explore your contribution before the viva and you can be ready for exploring it in the viva.
Why did you work on your PhD?
Any of these situations are fine. There’s no magic “best reason” for doing a PhD or selecting a topic. “Why did you do it?” is a good starter question. Whatever your reason is it’s really a lead-in to a topic you’ll definitely need to talk about in the viva:
Why was your research worth doing?
Seth Godin writes recently of “the magic of trade-offs” – an idea that resonated with my own memories of doing a PhD.
I’m sure you must have made trade-offs in the process of doing a PhD. Another way of looking at trade-offs is that someone makes an interesting decision. There may be no right or wrong, but for now this is the choice. A consequence, doing a PhD, might be that other options are closed to you as a result of your interesting decision.
And another consequence might be that your examiners ask you to talk about or defend your interesting decisions in the viva. Not because you’re right or wrong, or because your examiners are – but because your decisions are interesting. They’re worth talking about and exploring.
In preparation for your viva, review your interesting decisions. Where did you trade-off different things? How did you make those decisions? What were your reasons?
And do you still think it was the right thing to do?
What are the most important papers or ideas that started your research journey?
What were the most important days of your PhD?
What are the most important passages in your thesis?
Where did you do the most important work of your research?
What are the most important skills you’ve developed or built on while doing your PhD?
All of these questions have subjective responses, but are all worth considering. Your work must have important stuff, and even with typos or different perspectives or things that could be changed, it’s far better to focus on what is important and good about your research, than direct attention to things that could detract.
A question with an objective response: who did the work to create a thesis from all of this important stuff?
(don’t forget the answer to that one)
To reach submission you must have made a contribution: you must have done something. Reflecting before the viva and making notes, even using a simple question, can be quite powerful.
To begin with, three simple questions: Why did you do it? How did you do it? What did you do?
If you’re looking to dig a little deeper with simple questions, consider the following:
These are simple to ask, but could have complex responses. Notice too that they are aiming at the same thing – your contribution – but from different perspectives.
By reaching submission you must have done something. Use questions in your preparation to help you explore that something and find useful ways to think about it and share it with others.
I believe it’s worth reflecting on this a little before the viva.
What have you forgotten?
Perhaps you can’t know for sure. You’ve had to edit out papers, ideas and references that didn’t fit. You forgot them, to concentrate on what mattered.
Perhaps there are details that elude you sometimes; if so, what can you do make them more memorable or to summarise them?
Perhaps you view the question as an almost-irrelevance, a nonsense. How could you remember what you’ve forgotten?
I think it’s useful to remember that however much you have forgotten, accidentally or so you could focus, there must be so much more that you remember by the end of your PhD. You have a lot of knowledge, which doesn’t mean simply knowing more: you know more of what you need.
What have you forgotten? What do you remember? What do you know?