Daily viva help for PhDs
Don’t rush into viva prep. Make sure you have everything you need and a plan to help you get through the work you need.
Do small tasks first. Check the regulations. Ask for help. Place bookmarks at the start of chapters.
Stretch! Do small things so you know you’re starting well and won’t crash as soon as you find something difficult or you have a bad day. Start small and build up to being ready for your viva.
There are lots of statistics about the general experience of the PhD viva – but we can’t combine them to find out the probability of a particular outcome.
Want to know how likely it is you’ll have a four-hour viva with major corrections and three examiners instead of two? Sorry, I can’t tell you and you can’t work it out.
There are lots of patterns of experience. Vivas tend to result in minor corrections. They tend to be longer than two hours. But to combine these and other details meaningfully and make predictions we’d need to know a lot more.
PhDs and vivas are unique: they follow patterns, but are always different. The patterns can show you what you can do to be ready in whatever situation you find at your viva.
You don’t need to work out the odds of success: instead work towards being ready to talk with your examiners and prepared for passing your viva.
Hope is what we have when we have little leverage on the outcome.
I encourage PhD candidates to prepare for their viva rather than hope it will just all go well, because preparation leads to a better experience and a better outcome. No candidate needs to hope that they will be ready when they can act to be ready.
You might need to hope you feel excited or enthusiastic for meeting your examiners. It’s rare in my experience that candidates feel that way. I ask candidates how they feel about their viva at the start of every webinar I do and between five and ten percent say they feel excited.
At the end of a session they might say they feel better, but it’s rare that they now feel excited!
I know what someone can do to feel ready. I know the kinds of actions someone can take to be prepared. But I only hope that candidates feel excited. Confidence can ward against nervousness, but excitement is another thing entirely.
Maybe that’s something else I can consider in the future: how can you go from confident to excited?
Maybe if more people were excited it would be simpler to build up a positive culture around the viva.
And maybe then the viva would be something that fewer people were worried about.
If you’re finishing your PhD then you will know a lot of people who have advice for you (sometimes whether you want it or not).
Friends, colleagues, supervisors, researcher-development staff, random internet people with their daily blogs… How do you decide who to listen to and what to do, particularly when it’s for something as important as getting ready for your viva?
First, consider the source: do they have experience, knowledge or understanding of what they’re talking about? Or are they just repeating what they’ve heard on the grapevine?
Second, consider the context: is the advice specific or vague? Did you ask for it or was it just offered? Does it meet your needs?
Third, consider your situation: can you put this advice into practice? Do you feel that it will be of benefit?
Let’s be charitable and say that any advice you’re offered is, in some way, well-intentioned.
Advice gives you options: it gives ready-made ideas for what you could do, but you might need something different. You don’t have to accept it. You can say thank you but leave it to one side. You could be inspired to do your own thing and make your own option.
Ask for advice, listen to advice but make sure the option you take fits your needs and circumstances.
If you had an extra day to get ready for your viva, what would you do?
Would you spend a chunk of time reading your thesis again, just in case you missed something?
Perhaps you’d feel better if you sat down and talked with your supervisor some more.
Or you could consider gathering stationery and going over your thesis pages one more time just in case you can add something helpful.
One more day is a lot of time and you could complete a lot of helpful work – but given everything else you’ve done during your PhD and after submission, maybe you could just take the extra day as a chance to rest?
Viva prep is a necessary part of getting ready. No tasks are particularly difficult, but if you are already tired, busy or stressed with regular work and life, then they can seem like more chores to get done.
There are lots of things you could do to help you stay motivated:
The last suggestion might be really helpful. Can you incentivise your own progress? What could you set up as a small treat for reading your thesis? Or for completing a mock viva? Would an extra break be enough or do you need something more tangible?
It’s not for everyone, but if you need the motivation to help with your viva prep, consider what you can do to reward your progress.
Every viva is unique but no viva should be a great unknown.
Regulations and stories of viva experiences give a shape to the general process; departmental and disciplinary practices give some fine detail to specific viva norms. Taken together these give a general pattern of expectations: you can’t know exactly what will happen, but you can imagine something that the viva will tend towards.
Every viva is different, so you can expect the unexpected – a unique experience – but you can also expect your viva to be like others you’ve heard about in your preparations. You won’t know which details will follow the pattern exactly, or how closely, but unless your situation is very different from every other PhD candidate you can expect your viva to be similar to many past stories.
Every viva is unique but you can expect yours to follow expectations.
If a friend or colleague asks for help with their viva prep then assist them if you can. Ask what they need and help with their request as much as you’re able.
Perhaps they need to know what to expect from a viva. Share your experience or share what you’ve heard from trusted sources. Point them in the right direction for more help.
If they ask you to listen or to ask them questions then try to be there for them. Do this regardless of whether you’ve had a viva. When you’re asked to listen or discuss, help flows both ways. You learn while you offer support: the experience you get being in conversation helps you too.
There are valid reasons to say no to helping – you are busy or you really feel like you’re not the right person – but if you can, help your friends when they need someone.
Every page on the Viva Survivors site has a little link in the sidebar that says
Click here for a random post of viva help!
If you use it then you’ll find yourself reading one of (currently) 2467 daily viva help posts.
If you have a specific topic or problem you’re looking to read about then the search bar or selecting a tag beneath a post will be a better way to find help. But if you just want to read a helpful thought related to the viva, the random post link is probably the way to go. Here are five posts that the link just gave me:
A few random posts can offer a lot of help – and I’ve worked to make sure that there’s a lot more than a few random posts on Viva Survivors.
If you’re looking for help, you’ll find some here 🙂
Between submission and your viva, take an hour or two to see if any recent, relevant papers have been published that you haven’t noticed while you’ve been busy.
You’ve not missed them though. They’re still there. You can read them now.
It could be that one or more of them has something that you could have included in your thesis. But you didn’t. You’ve not missed it. You don’t need it now.
A thesis always has a line drawn under it in some way: I studied and worked up to this point. There’s always more published and always new connections to be made.
But not now. This far. No further.
You check for recent, relevant papers for yourself, to make sure your personal knowledge is more full; you don’t look for more references or new ideas to add to your thesis.
You’ll probably have corrections but those aside your thesis is complete.