Daily viva help for PhDs
It’s wrong to hope for confidence at your viva but right to believe you’ll succeed.
Confidence is cultivated: you don’t just cross your fingers and hope for it. You have to do something to change how you feel.
Believing you’ll pass is sensible: the statistics show that the overwhelming majority of PhD candidates who submit a thesis succeed at the viva. It’s reasonable to believe you’ll pass too.
Don’t hope for confidence – build it up. Don’t worry about passing – work towards it.
Good viva prep has core activities: reading your thesis, making notes, creating summaries, checking papers and rehearsing for the viva. Every candidate needs to do these sorts of things and every candidate needs to consider how they will do them.
What are your options?
How someone prepares depends on many things:
There are many possibilities and so many options generally for getting ready for the viva – even if the work itself builds on a few core activities.
Consider your options for prep when you get to submission. Sketch a few plans and see what fits best. Make sure you’re covering the core activities and meeting your needs.
That’s your best option.
The viva is your time to shine. You can show the best of your research, your PhD experience and your capability as a researcher in your field.
At the viva you have time to shine. You don’t need to rush and you don’t need to rapid-fire responses. You can pause and think and be careful in how you discuss everything with your examiners.
You have to be ready for the time you’ll shine. Getting ready means being prepared practically but also knowing that vivas take time. Two to three hours is fairly typical. What do you need to be ready to discuss your work for that long?
The viva is your time to shine. Be ready for it.
PS: it’s almost time for Viva Survivors Select 09 to shine! The next issue of my viva help zine is coming next Wednesday 15th April 2026. Twenty of my favourite posts from 2025, two new pages of viva help including a new viva prep game and all original artwork by me. Do look out for the release announcement next week and if you get help from the Viva Survivors blog do consider picking up the issue.
The five words that start you on a path to resolution. They work in all kinds of situations in life and help a lot with getting ready for the viva.
Many viva problems start with feeling that something is wrong. A gap in your expectations, an issue with your thesis, a delay to some part of prep – any one of these could make you feel that things aren’t right.
They might not be a problem. The only way you’ll know for sure is if you stop sitting with the feeling and say, “I might have a problem.”
Then you can do something else: you can explore the situation, ask for help, check something or simply take steps that move you towards feeling better.
Given all the problems you must have overcome during your PhD journey you can deal with any situation that occurs during your viva prep – so long as you’re willing to admit that you might have a problem.
Don’t simply sit with the discomfort of feeling something’s wrong. Work past it.
Rest is an essential component of the viva prep period.
Almost every kind of question that might help someone unpack practical prep they need to do for the viva could also help them rest:
Good rest is a part of good viva prep.
Good viva outcomes follow a long series of good actions by you and other people.
You can’t control what other people do. You can take responsibility for what you do as you get ready – and remember what you have done on your PhD journey so far.
So, very simply: what are you doing and what have you done that puts you on track for a good outcome at your viva?
(it’s a lot!)
As you get ready for your viva, consider your PhD journey so far.
In short, who have you become?
The typical picture of the viva as imagined by regulations, stories and ideas shows three people sat around a table having a conversation.
If your research seems a little different or your viva might be atypical as a result of something you’ve made or found then check with your regulations and supervisors to find out what you do.
What are the expectations when you’ve done something a little different? What do you need with you to showcase your research at the viva?
When something isn’t quite right in your research do you explain things with excuses or reasons?
Did you do something wrong? Did you forget something? Were you careless? Were you to blame?
Words matter. Be careful how you take responsibility for something. Consider why and how something happened, what you did at the time and what you could have done.
Remember that you can take responsibility but that doesn’t mean that you’re to blame.
And remember that if there is a problem in your research you can take steps before the viva to be ready to talk about it. Writing a summary, talking with your supervisor and thinking carefully can help you talk if the topic comes up.
That’s what getting ready for your viva is: finding your way from where you are when you submit your thesis to where you need to be for your viva.
Getting ready involves viva prep – and just as every thesis, candidate and viva are unique, so too is the process of getting prepared.
There are common threads and good ideas but you’ll have to find your own way. There are practical steps you can take but you’ll also need to look back on your PhD journey to find certainty in how you got this far.
That certainty will help you find the confidence to go further. You’ll find your way.
It’s not far and you can do it.