Make A Note
Make a note of any papers that have helped your research develop. Make a note of the times that you remember great success during your PhD. Make a note of what you know about the viva. Make a note of...
Daily viva help for PhDs
Make a note of any papers that have helped your research develop. Make a note of the times that you remember great success during your PhD. Make a note of what you know about the viva. Make a note of...
I’ve shared a lot of thoughts on the importance of writing summaries as part of viva prep. They can be a useful way to explore an aspect of your work. They can help to focus attention and simplify complicated ideas....
What did you do? It’s unlikely your examiners will ask you as simple a question as this to explore your PhD research but the thought will be there. What did you do? When your examiners ask about your research, remember...
Around 2013 I invented a series of prompts to help a candidate reflect on their thesis. Through not-so-subtle phrasing I got these keywords to spell out VIVA. The tool is used to explore the contents of a thesis chapter. All...
Three minutes is not long to share something of your work, whether on stage for a competition or as part of your viva. Depending on how quickly you talk and the emphasis you give to things, you have between 300...
It’s reasonable to expect your examiners to ask you to summarise what you’ve done. It’s a fairly common opening question. Given that a thesis could run to many tens of thousands of words it’s probable your examiners would want you...
Because cheatsheet sounds a bit wrong, how about you make a keysheet for your PhD? One page capturing all the things you need to know. Success in the viva is more than rote memorisation of details, but there are some that are...
I like SWOT – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats – as a simple tool that provides a lot of direction for thinking. I’ve written about it before but today I want to explore how it could help you think about you as...
Take a single sheet of paper, your thesis and half an hour to an hour and you can make something really useful for your viva prep. A summary of something, answers to a few key questions or thoughts on what...
A year ago I first shared 7776 Mini-Vivas, a resource to create useful summaries, reflections and conversations as part of viva prep. I love seeing people share the resource, and I continue to tinker with it to find other ways...