What Are You Holding On To?
We have a fireplace in our living room that looks like a coal fire. It’s not. It’s a gas fire. It’s not connected up. The previous owners of the house had it disconnected and we’ve never needed it. We use...
Daily viva help for PhDs
We have a fireplace in our living room that looks like a coal fire. It’s not. It’s a gas fire. It’s not connected up. The previous owners of the house had it disconnected and we’ve never needed it. We use...
What’s the final thing you need to do before submission? What’s the final piece of information about your examiners that will help you feel better about them? What’s the final thing you need to know about the viva? What’s the...
You can’t know in advance what your examiners will ask for every question. You can’t know how long it will be exactly. You won’t know what parts of your thesis they think need changing, amending or updating. You can’t know...
You don’t know how much time you’ll have in your viva. However long it is, it’s not worth stressing or obsessing. The best thing you can do is use the time that you have well. Use your time to listen,...
In the UK there have to be at least two examiners, one internal and one external. Both are important. It’s not true that the external has the final say or is senior to the internal. Both will have read your...
Different kinds of mistakes require different actions in the viva. If you find a few typos during your viva preparation you don’t need to go out of your way to mention them to your examiners. If you find a sentence...
I hear a lot of people describe vivas in binary terms. The viva is long or short. Either you’ll love it or hate it. Expect examiners to be fair or critical. Questions are either easy or hard. Preparation is straight-forward...
In your viva you might be able to handwave some details. To have time to explore the truly important aspects of your work you might want to skip past tricky things, or make a short point that captures something big....
I was halfway through my PhD journey before I accepted a truth about my research: “I’m trying this, but it might not work.” I spent weeks trying various methods to get an algorithm to act as I expected. It took...
In most cases the viva is a tough, fair, interesting conversation. In most cases the candidate finds out they have to complete some corrections afterwards. In most cases the candidate discovers that their worries about what might happen didn’t match...