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Tag: putting in the hours

Nathan

Best of Viva Survivors 2023: The Others!

Daily Post

Last week, between Christmas and New Year, I shared posts that collected some of my favourite writing on the blog from 2023. I like to round out the year like this but it’s hard to narrow down the lists of posts because there are so many that I’m fond of!

I shared posts on viva prep, surviving and confidence, but there were more posts I’m really proud of that didn’t neatly fit into one category or other. Rather than have them disappear into the ether of the Viva Survivors archive, here are five more of my favourite posts of 2023:

  • Putting In The Hours – a very personal piece, reflecting on my memories of my dad.
  • Surprising Questions From Candidates – surprising, not stupid! There are no stupid questions about the viva, viva prep and expectations 🙂
  • It Depends – Many questions about the viva have a response that starts with these two words!
  • My Atypical Viva – I remember lots of the little, weird details about my viva. It wasn’t like many others I’ve heard of – and at the same time it wasn’t so different either.
  • Was That It? – a little reflection on the day I submitted my final thesis.

Hope you find these five interesting or helpful!

Nathan

Putting In The Hours

Daily Post

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 of it you make seem effortless to others. That’s not to say it’s not still hard to you, but you can do it. You’re practised, you’re experienced. At the viva you can answer a question and engage with a discussion nearly every time because you’ve done so much during your PhD.

After all this time you have the knack.

The knack being know-how, a skillset, the knowledge, the means to just do something. It’s a shorthand for saying “you can just do it.”

 

Five years on, and today would have been my dad’s 75th birthday.

As I wrote in The Knack, for part of my childhood my dad worked as a market trader. In school holidays I would go to help and think it was a great adventure. Waking in the dark, flasks of tea, being given “grown-up jobs” of sorting things on the stall, selling things to customers, and joking with other stallholders and my dad. There was a lot of fun there.

And a lot of work. A lot of work. I remember my dad emphasising that. He wanted me to appreciate the amount of work that goes into something: the setup, the effort, the attention to detail, how you tell others and how you keep focussed.

This has some value for thinking about your viva. Remember all of the work you have put into your PhD by submission and viva prep time. It’s easy to simply acknowledge it as thousands of hours, but also remember what those hours were spent doing.

Learning, growing, discovering, writing, sharing and making something.

By the time you have your viva you have the knack for being a good researcher, but don’t forget how you got to where you are. What you did, what you achieved – and who helped you along the way.