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Nathan

The Birthday Sale Post

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It’s my birthday today and so begins a one-week sale on all of the ebooks and resources you can find at my little online store!

You don’t need to do anything to take advantage of the sale – no codes are needed, no mailing lists have to be signed in advance – you can simply go to this link and save some money on some great resources like Keep Going, 101 Steps To A Great Viva or The Viva Help Bundle.

I won’t say how old I am today, but will simply note that this sale – which runs until January 25th – will save 43% off the regular prices at my online store.

If you’re looking for viva help and like a little bargain then take a look. Please feel free to share the news of the sale too.

Right, I’m taking the day off now! Back tomorrow with more viva help 🙂

Nathan

BOOST Your Mini-Viva

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I like my mini-vivas resource, a tool to create valuable practice responding to questions before the viva.

I like the acronym BOOST for feedback – Balanced, Observed, Objective, Specific, Timely – a neat way to remember how to frame constructive feedback.

I’m always tinkering at the back of my mind with various resources, and have a notion these two might fit together quite well. As a starting place, how about the following sets of questions for feedback or reflection after a mini-viva?

If you use have a mini-viva by yourself, try these to help you reflect afterwards:

  • What stands out to you as a good response? What made it good?
  • What questions were challenging for you? Why?
  • What can you take away from this? How is that valuable to you?
  • What might you need to explore next?

If you have a friend help you by steering a mini-viva, then prompt them with the following to get feedback afterwards:

  • What did I communicate well? Why was it clear?
  • What did they not understand? What could I try?
  • What else did they want to know?
  • What other questions would they ask you now?

Having a mini-viva, giving a presentation, having a full mock viva – all of these things by themselves can be useful to give you a space to practise. You can “boost” the benefit you get with some targeted questions and reflections afterwards.

Nathan

Build Your Own Resources

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Whenever I commit the time to make a resource, I’ve chosen to make something as broadly useful as possible. The tiny book of viva prep is designed to be useful to everyone. The list of thesis examination regulations took time to do because I was trying to find all of the regulations.

I hope PhD candidates find my resources useful. As part of your viva prep I strongly encourage you to make your own too. Write summaries of key chapters of your thesis. Create a list of key references in your bibliography. Annotate your thesis pages to make them even more useful. Write lists of key questions you’d like to ask your examiners if you had the opportunity.

There’s a place for lots of useful viva prep resources: broad resources to start the process, and highly focussed ones just for you. There are plenty of people, me included, who can help with the generally helpful pieces. Only you can create the specific ones to help you get to and through the viva.

Remember the resources you build now are built on years of work too: you’ve created a lot of resources to get this far.

Nathan

Small Projects

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This post on small projects has been in my mind for several years. It’s worth a read! I like the idea that it can be both more productive and more effective to work on creating small things rather than undertaking massive endeavours. For example, I see Viva Survivors as a series of small projects under one umbrella, rather than one big behemoth.

I’ve been casting my mind around for a while on other small projects for the site, and at the time of writing have the following in my to-do queue:

  • Add tags and keywords to every post from the daily blog.
  • Curate a few lists of posts on similar themes.
  • Produce pages for each of the books that I have available (rather than only a single hub page).
  • Produce a new season of the podcast, approx 8 episodes that become available at the same time, like an album!
  • Create a few more Pocketmod tiny books, and several more minicast episodes.

Small projects are manageable. Even if you don’t have time to work on something immediately, you can see most of the parts and see where the challenges are. It’s the opposite of most research projects, where often you can’t appreciate everything until you’re already in it.

Viva prep can be a series of small projects, and none of them have to be over-taxing to complete. Reading your thesis and marking it up in a useful way is a small project. Creating summaries to draw out your thoughts is a couple of small projects. A mock viva or presentation to give you opportunity to think and talk is a small project. It all helps.

For your thesis, you had to think big. Maybe for your viva prep it’s useful to think small.

Nathan

Helpful

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Every now and then I look at the stats for the blog to see which of my posts have helped or resonated. Here are the ten most read posts from 2017:

  1. First Thoughts
  2. 9 Questions For The End Of The PhD
  3. Hierarchy of Worries
  4. Six Whys
  5. Who’s In The Room?
  6. Your Greatest Hits
  7. Cheatsheet
  8. Who’s Who
  9. Six More Whys
  10. The Perfect Thesis

There’s a mix of practical advice about preparation, reflections to get a candidate thinking and also discussion about examiners and worry. I’ve written on these themes a lot more on the blog, so you don’t have to look far beyond these posts to find something useful.

It’s also interesting because it gives me a perspective on what people find helpful and worth sharing. I’m really grateful whenever I see that someone has posted a link to one of my posts. The fact that these are the most read will help me to think about how I can do more to help people feel ready.

There’s lots of help on this blog, but there’s also lots of viva help elsewhere. Figure out what you need to feel ready and go looking.

Nathan

Future Resources

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I have an ever-growing list of ideas, potential projects and things to make to help people be ready for their viva. If you look around this site you’ll see lots of resources already:

  • over sixty episodes of the podcast in the archive;
  • a curated list of useful links from all over the place;
  • original free resources like The tiny book of viva prep and my first Viva Minicast;
  • pages with my ebooks and print guides;
  • and, to date, almost 250 daily viva posts!

I get stuck thinking about which future projects and resources to prioritise. Which should I do first? Are there any I shouldn’t bother with at all? What kind of resources will help? What would make the biggest difference?

Rather than try to figure it all out for myself, I’d love to hear your thoughts. If you have ideas for the kinds of resources that could help, then please, tell me! What you do you want? What do you think would help? Where are there gaps in terms of helpful resources about the viva?

Please email or tweet at me if you’ve any ideas!

Often the first step to finding a solution is really figuring out what you need. So… What do you need?

Nathan

Resourced

Daily Post

I’m happy to be doing this daily blog, to have the podcast archive to share, a starting selection of original free resources and also some paid ebooks to offer. But I’m not the only person who tries to help people prepare for the viva. Look around you. Your university might have some great resources that it can offer; they could have a series of videos to help, posts and articles about viva experiences or resources that they’ve bought in – great things like Viva Cards or The Good Viva Video.

If you see something useful, share it. If you need something, ask people. If something doesn’t exist, make it.

I’m going to keep writing, making and helping.