Favourite Failures
I have failed many times. Three years ago I spent a lot of effort and time developing an independent viva preparation workshop. I found a great venue and booked it three times upfront. I spent a lot of time and...
Daily viva help for PhDs
I have failed many times. Three years ago I spent a lot of effort and time developing an independent viva preparation workshop. I found a great venue and booked it three times upfront. I spent a lot of time and...
Make a quick list, five things you wanted to do during your PhD, but didn’t. Perhaps you had wanted to explore a certain topic, but didn’t, or maybe you wanted to attend a conference but couldn’t. Why not? Examine your...
It’s only recently, when reflecting on my PhD, that I realised my research niche wasn’t my topic. It wasn’t skein invariants of knots, or two-variable polynomial properties of three-dimensional links; that was my topic, but my niche was edge cases...
As you finish up your thesis, take twenty minutes to make a list of all the things that didn’t quite make it. What did you not have time for? What did you not have enough resources to do? What didn’t...
Don’t worry. It means you have something interesting in your research. It means that in the viva your examiners have a lot to ask about. And it means you’ve been working on your thesis for a long time. You will...
Let’s make some assumptions about your PhD: you didn’t plagiarise; you didn’t falsify results; you didn’t try to misrepresent anything in your work. All fair? Then there can’t really be any skeletons in your research closet. Maybe there are realisations...
“How long will your work be seen as current?” I don’t know how common this question is in the viva, but I think it is a fantastic question to explore in preparation. Get a piece of paper and jot down...
Nevermind typos in my final thesis, I made far bigger mistakes throughout my PhD research… I spent days trying to solve a typesetting issue, before realising I was making a simple code error. I tried for weeks to organise a...
Your thesis has answers and ideas, but what were the questions that lead to them? And where did those questions come from? You’ll spend plenty of time in preparation for the viva reflecting on the whats and the hows of...
A PhD is all about limits. There’s a limit to how much you could do. There’s a limit to how many questions you could ask and answer. There’s a limit to how many papers you could read. There’s a limit...