Daily viva help for PhDs
What would make your viva a good experience?
None of the above are irrational. Many of them might be beyond your control though.
Your viva can be a good experience. Focus on being prepared, not on the aspects that you can’t know or can’t control.
An effective strategy for feeling better about the viva is to take steps to know more about the academics examining you.
It will also help to read the regulations and remind yourself what your examiners are there to do. They have training to be examiners and they want to do the job well. They’re there to examine, not tear your work apart or break you down. They’re focussed on finding the good, not amplifying the bad.
Find out a little more about them and you can encourage yourself towards a good viva.
Many thanks to Sarah F from Bristol who shared the idea of searching YouTube for conference videos at a recent webinar!
I hate the thought of forgetting something important.
I prepare before any webinar that I deliver – even if, like Viva Survivor, I have delivered the session many, many times before.
I have shared Viva Survivor with postgraduate researchers over 350 times. And yet, every time before I start, I think, “Wait, what do I say?”
You can’t take notes like mine to your viva. Your examiners are looking for a presentation not a conversation. But still you can do things to help yourself if you think you’re going to forget something.
The last point is especially helpful.
Like me, you might feel bad at the thought of forgetting something that matters. Like my situation though, there are an abundance of things you can try to help you remember.
How do you feel about your viva?
How do you want to feel about your viva?
If your responses to these questions are different then you have a third question to consider: what will you do to feel how you want to feel about your viva?
Don’t wait and start your viva prep in the week of your viva.
Don’t wait to ask your supervisor about something important until a few days beforehand.
And don’t wait until the last minute before your viva to think about how you feel about it all!
Sooner, rather than later, think about how you’ll get ready.
Sketch plans. Ask questions. Reflect on your PhD and how you’ve developed both yourself and your research.
Viva prep is manageable. Compared to the massive scale of a PhD it’s a speck of effort.
A candidate might take weeks to get ready, but only in bits and pieces of time.
Half an hour of reading. Ten minutes of looking something up. An hour to bring some notes together.
You can run these sorts of tasks together into longer prep sessions but that’s not an essential part of the process.
Even a mock viva, if you have one, is manageable.
Viva prep is a series of manageable tasks that make the viva itself manageable.
This is how an attendee at a recent webinar summarised what I’d said about getting ready for the viva.
Control the controllables.
He was absolutely right. That’s how I think about a lot of things connected with the viva.
There are things you can’t control or won’t know until you get there. These range from questions to feelings to the approach that your examiners will take.
There are things you’ll know but won’t control too: the purpose of the viva, the date or location of your viva venue.
But there’s also a lot you could take control of.
All of these things and more can help how you feel about your viva.
There are a lot of things you can take control of for yourself in advance of the big day.
If you do that then the things that are beyond your control won’t seem so bad.
Many thanks to Luke C for offering this observation!
A lot of viva prep work is something only you can directly do: annotating your thesis, checking papers and so on.
There are lots of support roles though.
Supervisors can provide mock vivas and perspective; PhD colleagues can listen and ask questions; university staff can signpost resources.
Friends and family can help with two incredibly important jobs: proofreading and understanding.
Before submission, if it’s helpful, see if a member of your friend and family circle can offer a little time to read over your thesis. They’re not looking to grasp your arguments or check your references. They’re trying to spot typos, long sentences, clunky paragraphs and other basic writing things you might not be capable of seeing after so long spent writing.
After submission it will be helpful for your friends and family to listen and understand what you need. They can’t give you a mock viva. They probably can’t ask helpful questions about your research. They may have no way of sharing useful resources with you.
But they can make space, time, peace and quiet for you to prepare.
Proofreading and understanding. Two valuable resources for anyone finishing their PhD.
I use VIVA as a little acronym-tool for reflecting on one’s research ahead of the viva:
It’s a helpful tool and can be particularly helpful when thinking about the thesis chapter-by-chapter.
I’ve found it useful sometimes to take the VIVA prompts and apply them to other aspects of the viva as well. For example, what if we took the prompts and considered your examiners?
OK, OK, the last question didn’t change! But there are still four good reflection on your examiners ahead of your viva!
In the weeks before my viva I didn’t feel nervous.
I was too busy.
I kept myself occupied with reading my thesis a lot, making notes, reading papers, talking to my supervisor and wondering what to do after my PhD was finished. I didn’t have time to be nervous.
Until ten minutes before the start of my viva. I hadn’t slept well the night before and at 9:50am I was tired.
And suddenly I was acutely nervous. One thought occupied my mind: “What if I am just too tired for this? What then?”
Then my examiners arrived, slightly awkward pleasantries ensued and I didn’t have time to think about whether I was tired or not; I was nervous and I had to simply get on with my viva.
Viva prep helps someone get ready. It can also be a helpful distraction from feelings one might not want to face.
“I don’t want to think about that.”
Nervousness is commonly a symptom of anticipating something important; it doesn’t mean that the something is negative and it doesn’t mean that nervousness itself is negative. It’s not usually a comfortable feeling, but it doesn’t have to be bad.
Distraction will only help so much though. Viva prep helps, but in parallel you have to build up your confidence for the viva. You have to build up certainty in yourself, your capability and the work you’ve done. Nervousness won’t disappear, but confidence can take the sting out of it.
Don’t distract from nervousness. Pursue confidence.
PS: to find out a lot more about viva confidence and getting ready, do come to Viva Survivor, this Thursday 5th December 2024. It’s my live webinar about everything to do with the viva, viva prep, expectations, examiners and more. I’ve shared this session over 375 times and I can’t wait to do it this Thursday as well. If you’re thinking about coming registration closes tomorrow at 5pm. Check out the details now – and maybe I’ll see you there 🙂