Daily viva help for PhDs
Candidates need to know more about examiners: how they prepare, what’s involved, what they’re asking, what they might ask and do and why. Examiners need to know more about candidates and the PhD journey in the 2020s: they need to...
In the viva, examiners drive the discussion by asking questions that: Explore your contribution; Investigate your authorship; Assess your capability as a researcher. In turn, a candidate typically worries that: They haven’t done enough; They won’t remember enough about the...
A small task for viva prep: book an hour or two in your diary to check recent publications. Check journals you have read in the past, ask your supervisors and visit pre-print servers if appropriate to see if there is...
You’ve written your thesis, read it in preparation for your viva and maybe made notes on pages. So why would you write anything else about it? Why would you write a summary as part of your viva prep? To gather...
What would you change about your viva prep if you could go back and do it over? I was asked this at a recent webinar. I knew immediately what I would change: I would have a mock viva. I definitely...
My PhD research was about something called knot theory. The basic question in this topic can be explained, essentially, as “if you loop up a piece of elasticated string and glue the ends together, can you tell if it’s fundamentally...
The viva is not a test of endurance, a space where you have to simply work through everything until it is done. You can take a break. You could be offered a break after an hour or two. You could...
To get ready for your viva you, in part, have to recognise and accept that you’ve done good work over a long period of time. You have to look at your research and be able to say, “This is good...
If you find a problem during your viva prep, big or small, do you need to solve it immediately? A typo might just need a note making for later correction. A clunky sentence could need underlining to revise, so long...
Viva preparation doesn’t have to take a long time. It isn’t a huge amount of work, not compared to the scope and scale of a PhD. It doesn’t take long, generally, to read a thesis, make some notes, capture thoughts...