Daily viva help for PhDs
Take ten minutes to write down any questions you really want your examiners to ask. Take twenty minutes to write down keywords for each question to capture ideas of what you might say in response. Take thirty minutes to sit,...
Two words that really summarise what you need to do in the viva. Respond: you don’t have to have an answer for every question. You may or may not have an idea or opinion that’s fully formed. The viva is...
There are three things your examiners have to do in your viva: Explore your significant original contribution; Unpick the hows and whys of your research; Examine your capability as a researcher. They have to do this. There’s a lot to...
Before your viva, reflect on the best of your work, your results and your thesis. How can you communicate the value of what you’ve done? What are the words that will share how good your thesis is? Write summaries, capture...
Questions and comments in the viva are supposed to be fair, but they could also be tough. You might forget something. You might not know something. You might disagree with your examiners. You might be surprised. You might need time...
There’s a lot to do in the viva. There’s a lot to do to prepare for the viva, or at least a lot of tasks and thoughts to manage. You might feel a lot about what’s going to happen and...
A PhD journey is bounded in many ways. You can only read a finite number of papers and articles to build up your knowledge. There’s a cap on the number of words that a thesis can reasonably contain. You have...
Your examiners will ask you questions. They have to: it’s an essential part of the viva process. They will share opinions or make statements to encourage you to make a response but they couldn’t get through your viva without asking...
At the viva you’re doing more to tell your examiners about what you’ve done, how you did it and who you are. You’ve set that out in your thesis but now they need more from you. They need you to...
Tension is created when opposing perspectives meet, in the viva or elsewhere. In daily life that could be very challenging depending on the situation, but it doesn’t have to be that way in the viva. Disagreement in the viva just...