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Tag: getting ready

Nathan

Vision For Your Viva

Daily Post

Recently I was preparing for a talk and reflecting about the idea of “having a vision” for what someone does. My vision for this blog is:

To help all PhD candidates see the viva is a great big manageable challenge!

That’s the purpose, the goal, the reason I keep doing this. After nearly five years I’ve shared a lot – but there’s more to say. I sit down regularly and write because there’s more people to help. That’s why I do what I do. My vision statement helps remind and reinforce the why that I work towards.

Having a vision can help in so many ways. It can help keep you going, help you make decisions, help remind you of why you’re doing what you’re doing.

What’s your vision for your PhD? What’s your vision of your viva like? Reflect on how clear your vision is and think about how it aligns with what you’re doing. Then explore how you can steer yourself more towards your vision. What can you do to make that your reality?

Nathan

Easy Wins

Daily Post

Viva prep can sometimes seem like a huge project. Existing pressure, personal responsibilities and fatigue can all add to overwhelm. There are no shortcuts to getting ready, but you can start the process by completing tasks that take very little time.

  • Search for and bookmark your examiners’ staff pages to consult later.
  • Download a copy of the viva regulations for your university.
  • Stick Post-it Notes at the start of each chapter of your thesis to make it easier to navigate.
  • Send a short email to a friend asking them to give you a mini-viva soon.
  • Gather together stationery you could use to annotate your thesis.
  • Decide on whether or not you want a mock viva with your supervisor – and let them know.

Small tasks can provide real benefit to viva prep or help to set up greater success. If you’re daunted by the scale of what you need to do then get some easy wins. Get small tasks done and then start to break down the bigger project of viva prep into smaller pieces.

Nathan

Defining Effective

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I was helpfully challenged in a recent webinar to define what I meant when I talk about effective viva prep. It was a great provocation to help me unpick what I think.

  • Effective has to mean that it benefits the person doing the prep. They do the work and are prepared.
  • Effective has to include some idea of working smart: not starting early, not rushing or stressing while doing the work.
  • Effective viva prep must also help the candidate to feel that they are working towards being ready (and that ultimately they are ready for the viva).

Let’s define effective viva prep as a set of useful tasks and activities that help a candidate become ready for the viva in as organised and stress-free way as possible.

It’s a bit of a mouthful! Maybe there’s more we could say or a more concise framing but it’s not a bad start.

A definition doesn’t tell you what to do exactly for your situation though. For your circumstances consider:

  • What do you think you need to do?
  • When do you think you need to start?
  • How can you help yourself to see your progress to being ready?

We can usefully define what effective viva prep means generally, but you have to realise what that means for you specifically.

Nathan

Prep & Rest

Daily Post

Viva prep is better if it is planned a little. There’s no universal “best way” to get the work done, but the following questions could help:

  • How busy are you?
  • When could be a good time to start?
  • How much time can you commit regularly?
  • What tasks seem most helpful to you?
  • Who can provide support when you need it?

Exploring these questions can help set boundaries and ideas of what to do, when to do it and so on.

Rest is a key element to getting ready for the viva too, but is often overlooked. So use the following questions, adapted from above, to help:

  • How busy are you? And how much rest do you need to help recharge yourself?
  • When could be good times for you to rest?
  • How much time will you give yourself regularly?
  • What restful activities seem most helpful to you?
  • Who can help you to rest when you need support?

Prep helps before the viva. Rest helps before the viva. Ask yourself some questions if you’re struggling with either.

Nathan

There’s No Trick To Viva Prep

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Make a little plan for the weeks leading up to your viva. It has to include reading your thesis, annotating it usefully, writing some summaries, reading important papers and rehearsing for talking with your examiners.

Do the work in a way that doesn’t overstretch or over-stress you. Record your progress to confirm for yourself that you’re getting ready.

And that’s it. There’s no trick, just you doing the work.

Or maybe, if there is magic, it’s all you.

Nathan

Focus Matters

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Typos are far less important than the contribution you’ve made in your thesis. Sharing what makes your work valuable is worth more of your time than trying to remember every last reference and detail. Talking about your research helps you a lot more than only thinking about it.

Focus your prep on what matters most.

Nathan

Adding Up

Daily Post

As a mathematician I remember the thrill of the first time I encountered the ideas of group theory.

Without getting too technical, let’s consider one of the most simple ideas: imagine if it mattered which way around you added things up in a sum. Two plus three is five, but what if three plus two was something else? What would that mean? We can get really abstract with group theory. There are all sorts of weird and wonderful things you can do but that core concept is really important: in group theory it matters what order things are done.

The same is true in the real world too. If your socks are big enough you perhaps could put them over your shoes rather than the other way around. Your feet would be covered by the same two layers but definitely not in the same way. When cooking, sometimes it matters what order you add ingredients to a pan – and when!

 

When I write or talk about viva prep I often try to explain that viva prep can be broken down into lots of discrete tasks. These all add up to someone being ready, but of course it does matter what order these are done in. It’s not a good idea to have a mock viva before you’ve read your thesis or checked some papers. It helps to find out more of what to expect before you even start to get ready. It’s probably a good idea to look into your examiners’ publications before you ask your supervisor about them.

With some tasks it matters less, but still consider in advance how and when you do things, and in what order. Viva prep really can be divided into lots of smaller tasks. Taking your time to complete these can lead to you being ready. It all adds up – but it does matter what order you work on your viva preparation.

Nathan

Not To Plan

Daily Post

Over the last two years of your PhD journey I can imagine that there’s a lot that hasn’t gone according to plan.

That’s always the way with a PhD. You prepare and you think and you plan and then you work. As you work things change, for one reason or another – sometimes even in positive ways – but never quite according to plan.

But in these last two years things might not have gone to plan for some fairly big, world-changing reasons. Your research and the course of your PhD might have shifted a lot because of the pandemic. Access to supervisors, materials, resources and even your department might have been restricted. Day-to-day life might, at times, have been disrupted to the point where you just had to stop your research or change course completely.

While life continues to move ever on, and hopefully in a positive direction, the shadow of the last two years might fall over your thesis and your viva. Missed opportunities. Projects halted. Plans changed. Now you have to present your thesis and defend it.

If at times this worries you then remember: your examiners lived through this time too. They know what has happened. They know what an impact it could have on your work. They will understand.

As you prepare, reflect on the changes to your plans. How have your plans changed? What would you have hoped for from your original plans? What do the changes really mean for your thesis?

Importantly, do what you can to remind yourself that despite all of the changes and problems you still did the work. You have still done something that matters. It’s different to what you had planned but it’s still enough.

Nathan

Expect Good

Daily Post

What could your viva be like? It could be lots of things!

It could be four hours long but feel like it’s over in half that, like mine felt to me. It could begin with a chance for you to summarise what you’ve done or with an open question from one of your examiners. It could be that you are sat around a seminar room table with your examiners or that you’re talking to each other over video and at a great distance.

There’s a lot of variety to the viva. When you account for all of the weird one-in-a-million cases, like someone (me) standing for their four hour viva, the chief expectation for vivas is that they are good.

Expect your viva to be good. Expect your thesis to be well-received. Expect your examiners to be good and prepared. Expect that you’ll receive good questions.

Expect yourself to be good enough.

Nathan

Stacked Up

Daily Post

My daughter loves reading but hates tidying.

Consequently our living room builds up towers of books and ad hoc bookcases that lean against table ends. About once a fortnight something collapses, usually when just one more book has been added to an arrangement. Just one more book was just enough for the whole thing to give way.

As parents we encourage simplicity, putting things away, keeping what you need, tidying up what she’s finished with. She’s eight. She’ll get there.

(I hope!)

Viva prep isn’t that different, or at least how I’ve seen a lot of good candidates approach the work. They see “Just so much to do!” and think “How will I stack that up with what I already need to do?!”

It’s really not that much work. Starting with something simple helps.

Start by thinking about what you need to do to get ready. Start by listening to friends and colleagues about what they did. Start by making a little plan. Start by realising that you don’t have to stack all the work up: if you think ahead you can take your time. You can do the work in a way that works for you.

Then neither your viva prep nor your life will come crashing down around you.

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