Midsummer
Today is the longest day of the year in the UK. More hours of daylight. The shortest night. A special date in the calendar. And just one more day. Your viva could be the longest exam you’ve had. More concentration...
Daily viva help for PhDs
Today is the longest day of the year in the UK. More hours of daylight. The shortest night. A special date in the calendar. And just one more day. Your viva could be the longest exam you’ve had. More concentration...
Survive means manage to keep going in difficult circumstances. In some ways I feel like this is quite a mundane definition, almost boring: it doesn’t capture the flavour of what people tend to think about survival. Over time we have skewed...
‘Twas the night before my viva, and all through my place Not a sound could be heard with my book in my face; My thesis was filled with ideas and notes jotted And I felt oh so bad for the...
It may seem like an odd thing to post about, but I’ve been asked about the topic many times before by PhD candidates! “Is there anything I mustn’t say or do in the viva???” I don’t think there’s a real...
The viva is your final exam, but it’s not the only test. Throughout your PhD there are plenty of tests, big and small, formal and informal. You’ve passed them all to get to the viva. You didn’t need to be...
A few weeks ago I was patiently (at first, then impatiently) waiting for Avengers Endgame to be released at the cinema. Tickets booked, clock ticking down in my brain to when I could go and find out what happened. I...
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...
A question born of worry: the fear not that your examiners won’t like something or agree with something, but simply that they won’t understand your research. It’s unlikely your examiners would not understand your whole thesis, but possible that a...
Viva voce, is often translated as living voice or word of mouth. In the viva you have to answer questions and engage with your examiners. You have to demonstrate that the expertise that created your thesis is lodged in your...
If you break eggs to make an omelette, you never really expect any of them will be rotten. There are processes in place that mean a box of six free range eggs on a supermarket shelf are as good as...