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Nathan

Write It All Down

Daily Post

Before you begin your viva prep, write down everything you can think of that you need to do. This is before you make a plan. Get down thoughts of any little or big thing. After a few days of letting those ideas breathe you can start to make sense of how and when you’ll get things done.

As you do your viva prep, record what you do. Make a record of your actions, the tasks you complete and the outputs you create. This will help you to see that you are moving forwards to your viva with purpose. You’re not simply passing the time: you’re investing time in helping you pass.

After your viva is done, take twenty minutes to capture your thoughts about what the viva was like. What did you do to get ready? What made a difference? Keep a hold of these as you may have an opportunity to share helpful thoughts with a future candidate who needs a little advice.

There’s a lot to do to get ready for the viva. Take time to write and think, both to help you plan, to keep you on track and to help others in the future.

Nathan

Writing Size Comparison

Daily Post

There are many scales of writing that help you prepare for your viva.

Book: your thesis. You wrote it and can read it in advance of your viva to refresh your memory. You can also take it with you to the viva to refer to (and annotate it before then to make it even better).

Page: a long summary, a cheat sheet, a list of points or typos, a to-do list and more. Your thesis has lots of pages too; annotating it could be helpful to mark some out with sticky notes or page tabs.

Paragraph: a short summary. A couple of sentences that captures an overview of your contribution. A few lines on the skills you’ve developed. An outline of a specific argument that you want to remember.

Sentence: write out individual helpful points. What do you need to remember? How else can you phrase a key idea? How could you neatly summarise a page?

There’s a lot written to get you to submission and more that you can write afterwards to help as you prepare – and perhaps we can get even smaller…

Words: Success. Prepare. Confidence. Achievement. Passed.

Nathan

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

Daily Post

Every writer is asked this, at least from time to time. Postgraduate researchers are asked this too, particularly in the viva.

“Where do you get your ideas?”

“Why did you want to follow this research topic?”

“How did you know to do this?”

In your viva you have to be willing to talk about what started your process, how you knew to do something, why you wanted to do it and so on.

Ideas could come from reading. They could come from your supervisor. There might be a highly personal story or a really mundane, practical reality to them. It may be that on the way to working on one project you spotted something interesting that you needed to explore. There are so many routes to inspiration.

You need to be able to talk about the origin of your ideas in the viva, but don’t forget that as interesting as those ideas are they are nothing without the work that has developed them. Your work might be inspired by 100 papers, a chance encounter or by a funding advertisement – but it’s your work that has created your success, not the idea itself.

Wherever your ideas came from, it’s your work that has taken you so far.

Nathan

Episode 33: Dr Helen Kara

Episode

In the first episode of 2015, I’m very happy to be interviewing Dr Helen Kara, who is an independent researcher and director of We Research It Ltd. Helen completed her PhD on the emotion work of managers of Sure Start Children’s Centre, and it was great to talk to her about this – and of course her viva – but also her experience of starting a PhD following several years of being a researcher.

Helen has written a book on research methods, as well as several short guides on aspects of doing research. You can find her Amazon author page here. Feel free to leave comments or ask questions on this post, or you can get in touch by tweeting @VivaSurvivors or emailing me! I’m looking for more interviewees to share their PhD and viva stories this year, as well as people happy to talk about academic life or being an examiner. Please get in touch!

Thanks for listening! (and reading!)

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)

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