Daily viva help for PhDs
I love the questions I get in workshops. It’s nice to help people with answers. Sometimes questions surprise me with how they’re phrased or the details involved. Last week I had to pause to think about how to answer a simply stated query:
What impresses examiners?
You and your thesis. Reading a significant original contribution to knowledge; getting to discuss it with the researcher who did the work.
You are impressive: the work, the talent, the commitment.
I often write about looking for ways to boost or find confidence. I’m not sure I’ve wondered too much about why someone might have a lack of confidence on the blog, except for mentioning surface level things like “what if my mind goes blank?”
For a long time before, during and after my PhD I would be hyper-nervous on any occasion I would have to speak in public. Eventually that went away, through a lot of practice. But at the root was a worry that people would judge me somehow, not like me or what I had to say.
Where did that come from?
In my dim and distant memory I remember being in a play as a teenager, to an audience of mostly teenagers, and no-one liking it. A really different kind of situation to the situations in my PhD and afterwards. Somehow different anxieties had tied together over the years.
It’s freeing to remember it now. I’m older, more rational, and can look on it differently: I can think about what it means, what I can do about it. I still get nervous, like anyone does, but thinking about where those worries came from has helped me to do something about them.
If you feel nervous or anxious about any aspect of the viva, then don’t look first for things to boost your confidence. Search instead for what might be at the root. What is causing you to doubt? What is holding you back? What does it mean?
What are you going to do?
It’s a year since I started the daily blog. There’s times when it feels like I’m not doing all that much, but when I pause – like today – and look back I can see how much I’ve done. In one year I’ve written over 360 posts, released several free resources, produced several blog book compilations and delivered Viva Survivor workshops to over 500 PhD candidates around the UK. All in all, I’m quite proud of how far the blog has come in one year and what I’ve done to help people get ready for their vivas.
It’s important to pause whenever you can doing a PhD or any big project really: pause and think about what you’ve accomplished. Day-by-day it’s hard to see progress, but taking a pause every now and then can really help. Look back over your PhD. It’s no accident that you’re doing it. If your viva is coming up soon you’re in the best possible place you can be to meet the challenge. Day-by-day you might have your doubts but look back over a year and think about everything you’ve accomplished. Everything you didn’t have one year ago. Everything you’ve built up and created.
Draw on that motivation and don’t stop.
Do we need to talk again about the negative things that people say, think and feel about the viva? Particularly on Friday 13th?
Let’s just say this: if you ask around, if you listen to what people tell you – about their experiences, about what the regulations say, about the expectations that everyone involved really has – you’ll find the viva isn’t something to be feared. It’s not “dun dun dun!”
More like “done-done-DONE!”
There may be other academics who could do just as good a job as your examiners, but they won’t come with the same background, experience and knowledge as yours. When they ask questions about your work and how it relates to the wider field, they’ll do so through the prism of their own research. You can’t anticipate every question like this they might ask, but you can ask yourself two questions to help you prepare better.
Answering these two questions can help shape how you look into your examiners’ work. You don’t need to know everything – you can’t know everything – but you can do enough once you set some parameters. You can be ready for the interesting questions your examiners have ready for you.
(Do I need to give a spoiler warning for a movie that is over 75 years old?!)
In Dumbo, the little elephant with big ears is given a magic feather to help him fly, and off he goes. When he loses it he suddenly believes he will crash! Thankfully his good friend tells him he could fly all along: the feather was just something that gave him the confidence to do it.
And with that he flies again.
If you’ve done the research, written a thesis and submitted it, you don’t need a magic feather for the viva. You’re supposed to be there, you have the talent. If you have a ritual, be it three coffees or good day socks, and that helps, then do it – use whatever confidence you can find.
You don’t need one, but if a magic feather will help then get looking.
…is my ballpark, back-of-the-napkin calculation for how much time someone might spend working on a PhD.
Compare that to two to three hours in the viva.
Three orders of magnitude difference and then some.
If you’re nervous about the viva: you’ve taken no shortcuts to get here. In and among those thousands of hours are lots of reasons why you’re up to the challenge ahead.
You can prepare for your viva like you’re getting ready to fight: it’s a desperate struggle and you have to be ready for anything!
But how much time will that take? What does that say about how you feel about your thesis? What does that say about how you view your examiners?
You can prepare for your viva like it doesn’t really matter: most vivas end in success, and besides, your examiners have probably made up their minds anyway!
So is there nothing left to do? No value you could take away from the viva? Nothing that your examiners could surprise you with?
You can prepare for your viva like it’s just another day in the office: you know all you need to know, you’ve done all you can do and now there’s just one more day!
Which is the right ball park, but perhaps a bit fatalistic…
Or you can treat the viva as a milestone in your journey, and prepare for one more chance to show your qualities as a researcher in your field.
You can demonstrate, with a little preparation to get your thoughts in order, anything your examiners need from you in the viva.
Four ways to prepare for the viva. You get to pick which way you take. Totally your choice.
A PhD takes a long time, and there can be periods where you feel like not much progress is being made. Weeks and months can pass with what feels like little to show for it. Taking a step back can help you to see the fantastic achievements you’ve accomplished. Here are some questions to reflect on as you get towards the end of your PhD:
Marking your achievements is a useful source of confidence, particularly if your viva is coming up. Go a step further: reflect on how you felt, what you did and think about what further achievements these milestones lead you to. You’ve come this far by hard work, not luck.
From Wiktionary:
Able and efficient; having the ability needed for a specific task…
Sound like someone you know?
If your viva is coming up, how did you get to this point? How else could you have got here apart from being a capable researcher in your field?
You might be feeling nervous right now, you might be looking for confidence, but you’re definitely capable.
You have the skills, now take action to boost your confidence. What’s your first step?