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Nathan

Ten Words

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A quick bit of viva prep.

Write a few sentences on each of the following ten words. Don’t take too long, don’t overthink things, just reflect a little and then write a little:

  1. Thesis
  2. Examiners
  3. Methods
  4. Contribution
  5. Confidence
  6. Expectations
  7. Feelings
  8. Problems
  9. Success
  10. Questions

Put all of your sentences to one side for a few days, then come back and read them. Whatever you’ve written tells you something about how you’re approaching your viva.

What does it all mean and what do you now need to do?

 

PS: If you’re looking for more ideas of what you can do to get ready for your viva, take a look at the  Viva Help Bundle of ebooks. A collection of my best blog posts, a practical guide to getting ready and a reflective writing game to build confidence – available for £6 until Thursday 30th November 2023.

Nathan

Seven Reflection Questions

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When inspiration is not flowing there are tools you can use to unstick thinking. SCAMPER is one of those tools: an acronym to prompt looking at things differently. I knew I had written something about it on Viva Survivors before but was surprised when I checked that it was over five years ago!

Time flies, eh?

I was looking for inspiration for today’s post and SCAMPER stood out to me as a way to prompt a series of questions to explore different aspects of someone’s research in advance of the viva. These questions could help to find useful thoughts or parts of your research for further reflection.

  • Substitute: could you have used a different method to do your research?
  • Combine: what ideas did you bring together?
  • Adapt: how could someone use your research in the future?
  • Magnify: where would you direct someone to focus their attention in your thesis?
  • Put to other use: what other conclusions or questions can you find based on your work?
  • Eliminate: what did you have to take out of your plans as you did your research?
  • Rearrange: what changes would you make to your research process if you could?

After any of these questions you could also go deeper by simply taking your first response and asking, “Why?”

Nathan

A Little Help

Update

I’ve been publishing Viva Survivors for over six years. In writing more than 2300 posts I’ve shared why candidates succeed, what they can expect, what they can do to prepare and how they can find the confidence to believe that it will all be OK on the day. If you need a little help for your viva, you can probably find it in the archives of this blog

If you need a little extra help then remember the community you have around you: you know people who have examined vivas, who have prepared recently or who have succeeded in the past. There’s a lot of help close at hand if you look for it.

And finally if you have your viva coming up and you still feel like you need a little more help, then please take a look at the Viva Help Bundle of ebooks – which is on a very special sale until the end of November.

The Viva Help Bundle contains:

  1. Keep Going, my collection of 150+ posts from the first five years of the Viva Survivors daily blog.
  2. 101 Steps To A Great Viva, my guide to practical steps that every viva candidate can take to help themselves.
  3. How You Got Here, a short reflective writing game to look back over the PhD journey and find confidence.

Actually, there’s a lot of help packed into the Viva Help Bundle – and it is available for £6 until Thursday 30th November 2023. If you think it might be the help you’re looking for, please take a look. And if you want to know more, please get in touch 🙂

Nathan

Turn The Page

Daily Post

Thesis pages have words, gaps, lines, margins and space at the top and bottom.

Annotation is a key step in viva preparation: adding something to make what’s there even better for the purposes of the viva. You gain a little help when you do the work because you have to think about what you need to add and why – and you get even more by making a special edition version of your thesis to use in the viva.

Every page in your thesis gives you an opportunity to help yourself but you don’t need to add something to every page or overload every page with more words, underlining and highlighting. The opportunity could be used by thinking, “Actually, this is fine as it is.”

Turn the page. Look carefully. Add what you need.

Nathan

Rough Edges

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Thesis submission typically comes after many hundreds of days of work: learning, development, growth and making something. You can’t get to that point without learning how to do something well.

Perfection isn’t attainable, but viva prep is a short period of time to help you get better for the particular task of the viva. You can clean up the rough edges of your memory, smooth over common stumbles in how you explain things and be more confident for meeting your examiners.

It’s a little work, but it can help a lot.

Nathan

Viva Prep Party!

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Imagine that viva prep is an amazing party!

  • Look at your diary and think about when you’ll host it.
  • Who do you invite?
  • Do you need to invite more people so that you can be sure of enough help?
  • What supplies do you need to make sure that it goes well?
  • It’s a really long party probably, so what will happen when?
  • What do you need to do in advance to help it along?
  • And how will you maintain your own energy throughout?

Of course, viva prep is not a party but similar questions can help you organise, get help and do the work well.

That way you’re ready for the celebrations after your viva!

Nathan

Before You Finish

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Before you submit your thesis check and double-check that it says everything you want it to say.

Before your viva day take time to get ready: practical preparations and confidence building!

Before your viva begins spend a couple of moments breathing, reminding yourself that you have done everything you can to get ready and that you have done enough to pass your viva.

Before the end of your viva take a moment to see if there are any questions you want to ask your examiners.

And before you finish your PhD journey take a little time to really reflect on what the journey has meant to you.

It’s more than a book you’ve written or a piece of paper you get from your institution.

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

Prep To Succeed

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Viva prep gives space to review and reflect, highlights important information and allows you to rehearse the kind of work you’ll do in the viva.

Viva preparation is a series of actions leading to success.

Do the work and you’ll be prepared, not perfect. You don’t succeed by getting all the right answers, but by being ready to respond to the questions and comments of your examiners.

Nathan

Key Papers

Daily Post

Here’s a little viva prep activity that will probably take less than an hour.

With your thesis to hand write a list of ten key papers that have helped your research. Don’t overthink: just list whichever papers come to mind or which stand out when you glance through your thesis.

Once you have your list, take a few minutes to reflect on each paper and write a sentence or two to respond to each of these questions:

  1. Why is this a key paper in developing my thesis research?
  2. How did it help my work directly?
  3. What was the result or impact of using this paper?

In less than an hour you’ll have written clear, concise notes about what matters most in the best of your bibliography.

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