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Nathan

Examiner Profiles

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You can ask your supervisors for guidance. You can talk to colleagues about your ideas. You can even ask your non-PhD friends for help. You can’t ask your examiners anything before the viva, but you can do some work to get insight and feel confident about answering their questions.

Follow this seven step process for each of your examiners to get a sense of where they might be coming from:

  1. What papers have they recently published?
  2. Are there any themes, topics or ideas that they are consistently exploring?
  3. How does their research connect with your thesis?
  4. What are their declared research interests (on their staff page)?
  5. How do their research interests overlap with yours?
  6. What do you know about their reputation?
  7. How could their opinions help you?

Work your way through these questions for each of your examiners, either researching to find out information (like their papers or interests) or reflecting to see what it means for you. The last question is important particularly if you’re working towards an academic career. Your examiners will be part of a small group of people who have read all of your work. Their opinion could give you a helpful steer or fantastic idea.

You can’t ask them for help before the viva, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find some help from them anyway.

Nathan

SWOTting Up

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SWOT is a neat thinking tool: rather than just throw ideas around to try to unpick a problem or situation it uses words to direct attention. As an acronym it stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. For example, if you had an idea for writing a book and wanted to analyse it you might think about the following:

  • Strengths: what resources do you have? What knowledge can you pass on?
  • Weaknesses: what will you struggle with in the writing? What is difficult to share?
  • Opportunities: can you use the same material for something else? What doors might it open?
  • Threats: why might this not work? Is there a potential downside by doing it?

I love tools based around framing words and SWOT is a really flexible tool. It works well for reviewing a PhD thesis during viva preparation too:

  • Strengths: what are the highlights of the thesis? What might others find valuable?
  • Weaknesses: what parts are difficult to explain? What are the limitations of what you’ve done?
  • Opportunities: how might you extend your work? What can you do now?
  • Threats: how might someone criticise what you’ve done? Are there any potential problems?

What else can you do to look at your thesis a little bit differently?

Nathan

Four Questions For Your Supervisors

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First, far in advance of submission, who would be good choices for examiners? Get their feedback, be a part of the discussion. Ultimately your supervisors will get to nominate.

Second, after the hustle and bustle of submission is done, what would they say is the most problematic part of your research? It won’t be anything that is wrong, and it might not be anything controversial, just something that needs a little extra thought.

Third, and once you’ve thought about it for yourself, what do they think are the strongest results or outcomes of your research? They will see everything you’ve done, but will have a slightly different perspective and that’s useful to know.

Finally, when the dust has settled and your viva is done, what can you do better now? There will be a lot of ways that you have grown during your PhD, but it can be difficult for you to spot them day-to-day.

What else might it be good to ask? Have a think, see where your ideas take you.

Nathan

Six Whys

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Why questions are the root of reflection. You have to take a step back and ponder. Here are six for viva preparation:

  1. Why were you attracted to your field of study?
  2. Why was your particular focus worth pursuing?
  3. Why were the methods you used the best fit for what you did?
  4. Why are you certain of the results you’ve found?
  5. Why is your interpretation of those results correct?
  6. Why is your research a significant contribution to your field?

Big questions. Take some time to think about these, maybe journal them or make some notes. They get at the core of your research.

Nathan

Five Stars

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What would a well-reviewed viva look like? Given that there’s two parties, what would they say about each other? I wonder…

Best examiners ever! Felt like they had really read my thesis and asked me lots of interesting questions. Was such a thrill to talk about my work with them. Gave me a lot to think about too, but all good. Would totally recommend to future candidates!

What kind of examiners would you give this review to? What are you looking for? Who might fit this description?

Stellar candidate, five stars! Took the time to think through our questions and answer our concerns. Clearly well-prepared: confident responses, excellent research. We wish them all the best for the future. Congratulations.

What would you need to do between now and the viva to get a review like that? What are you going to do?

Nathan

9 Questions For The End Of The PhD

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How often did you reflect during your PhD? Here are nine questions to help with some end of PhD reflection. Write or record answers for them. Your examiners are unlikely to ask some of these, but perhaps you’ll find some new insights.

  1. What’s your PhD worth?
  2. What does your PhD mean?
  3. What will you do next?
  4. What can you do now that you couldn’t do at the start?
  5. What do you know now that you didn’t know at the start?
  6. What was the greatest challenge you overcame?
  7. How did you do it?
  8. What did you leave unfinished?
  9. How do you feel now you’re at the end?

Come back to your answers after the viva. See if any of them have changed. If they have, why?

Nathan

Hierarchy of Worries

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I record every question I get asked in workshops. The text document runs to over 15,000 words now. Over time I see trends and themes, and they help me to think about how I evolve the workshop.

In particular I see the worries of candidates collect in three groups:

  • First, people worry that there could be something wrong with their research;
  • Second, they worry that they may have made a mistake in the write-up;
  • Third, they worry that they may not be able to answer a question from their examiners.

I get lots of questions related to all these areas, and I think they’re arranged in a hierarchy. I think people are more worried about the second kind of worries than they are the first; I think they’re more worried about the third kind than the second. It makes a certain kind of sense. Research takes a long time to mature – you know everything you’ve done, everything you thought of doing, you learned from so many mistakes and successes. You know your research. Writing up took less time – however much you know about your research, there’s a chance that you’ve made a significant typo or forgotten something. You may have expressed something in a clumsy way. It’s not all that likely.

Whatever you did in your research and write-up though, you have no way of knowing exactly what your examiners will ask. There are lots of common questions, but your viva is a custom exam: you can’t predict every question or how you might respond.

Three common groups of worries, but some are more worrying than others. What do you do?

  • Worried that something is wrong with your research? Map out your methods. Check the core literature. Test your assumptions again. Try to explain it to someone who doesn’t know that much.
  • Worried that you’ve slipped up somewhere in your thesis? Get more feedback. Read it closely, line by line, no skimming. Ask a friend to proofread. Read it aloud to check that it makes sense.
  • Worried about your examiners’ questions? Practise answering questions. Have a mock viva. Use a list of common viva questions and record your answers. Get friends to ask you any and every question about your research.

Feeling worried? That’s OK. Work your way past the worries.

Nathan

Terrified

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The last time I was terrified was watching Get Out. I’m not going to spoil it, and if you intend to see the movie I suggest you stay spoiler-free.

I saw it at a lunchtime screening. Afterwards I walked out of the cinema with my heart pounding. I spent the rest of the day on a big adrenaline high. I’m really serious: it took about ten hours for the terror to go away. It’s a great, scary movie with a compelling story that leaves you with a lot to think about.

Nathan, this blog is about the viva and viva prep, where are you going with this?

I ask in workshops how candidates feel about their viva. Worried. Nervous. Unsure. Excited.

Sometimes they tell me they’re terrified. When they do I can tell they mean it, it’s not an exaggeration. They are beyond scared. The thought of the viva makes them terribly afraid.

I don’t have an easy answer to this problem. If scary movies make you terrified, you can avoid them. If the viva makes you terrified, you still have to have one. I’m a huge fan of Seth Godin and this post from March is really helpful if you’re facing viva fear. The level of fear or terror we get in the modern world is disproportionate; we’re not being hunted by large predator animals, but we can still have strong fear responses. But as Seth says in the post: “As soon as we give it a name, though, as soon as we call it out, we can begin to move forward.”

That’s the not-easy answer: if you have viva-fear, figure out what it is that makes you afraid, and then you can start to change.

Scared of what the examiners think and how you’ll respond? Get feedback from others so you have practice.

Worried that you’ll forget everything? Read your thesis carefully and make some summaries for yourself.

Terrified that you’ll freeze when asked a question? Have a mock viva or get friends to ask questions.

Once you name your fear you can do something about it.

Nathan

Sip & Pause

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The viva is questions: your examiners want to talk to you about your research and there’s 101 things they could want to know.

The viva is answers: if you don’t talk about your research you’re not going to get very far.

It’s 100% fine to pause before answering – questions deserve a little thought at least, not just an automatic response – but social conditioning tells us that we have to answer as quickly as possible. In workshops people say things like “Won’t my examiners think I’m rude if I pause?” and “My examiners will think I don’t know anything!” Either could be true if you were pausing for minutes, but we’re talking about seconds.

Still, sitting in silence in an exam like the viva can be uncomfortable. I like Dr Claire O’Callaghan’s suggestion in Episode 27: take a big bottle of water to sip after each question is asked. That way you can take those seconds to get the question straight in your mind, start thinking about a response and answer well.

Nathan

A Good Choice

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In most institutions PhD candidates can talk to their supervisors and discuss possible examiners. There may be hundreds of names that could fill the roles. What makes for a good choice? Who do you pick? How do you pick?

I like creative thinking tools. There’s a lot of them, and many approaches aimed at finding a creative solution to a problem propose divergent thinking – trying to find as many ideas as possible – followed by convergent thinking – using tools to narrow down possibilities to the most suitable choices.

Some questions to open up the space of possible examiners:
Who have you cited?
Who have you met at conferences?
Who has particular interest in the kind of research you’ve done?
Who has a reputation for being excellent?

Some questions to narrow the field:
Who is just an absolute no? (for whatever reason)
Whose name would be a useful reference?
Whose work have you criticised?
Whose work do you find particularly influential?

These questions can be useful, but I think you first need to have some idea of good examiner qualities. The overall question is far more personalised than people usually take it: instead of “what qualities should you want in a good examiner?” the question needs to be “what qualities do I want in my examiner?”

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