Daily viva help for PhDs
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There’s a difference between the thoughts you want from your supervisors before and after submission.
While finishing your thesis there are all sorts of things you might want them to consider. Does it read well? Is this right? Does it communicate what I want it to? Can you spot any typos? You want their thoughts on these and other questions because you want your thesis to be as good as possible. It can’t be perfect, but you want it to be good enough.
Your supervisors’ feedback can be a valuable part of the work that you need to do.
After submission, you still need thoughts from your supervisors but the need is different. You don’t need more ideas or suggestions on how to make your thesis better. Instead you want an outsider perspective. Your methods are sound, but what other approaches are there? Your conclusions are valid, but how else might someone look at what you’ve done? Your work is good, but what other good work could someone do in this area?
You’re not looking for more feedback. You’re looking for a different perspective. Not necessarily your examiners’ perspective, but something different to get you thinking. Listening to different perspectives as part of your prep – and responding to them – can be useful practice for the viva.
If viva prep seems hard – you’re tired, stretched, stressed, busy – then think about how you can make doing it somehow rewarding to you.
You need to prepare for your viva, but that need by itself might not be enough. What can you do to help you get it done?
I’m not a fan of the abstract in my thesis:
This thesis uses Kauffman skein theory to give several new results. We show a correspondence between Kauffman and Homfly satellite invariants with coefficients modulo 2, when we take certain patterns from the respective skeins of the annulus. Using stacked tangles we construct a polynomial time algorithm…
And I’ll stop there before I lose every reader of this blog for ever! I look at my thesis now and again, and whenever I read my abstract I think, “What does it all mean? Why would anyone care? Why did I care?”
Of course, abstracts are needed to share what a thesis is about. They have a place. I think it would have been helpful for me, to boost how I thought about my thesis, if I also wrote a blurb – the kind of thing you read on the back of a book or a DVD box that’s there to draw someone in.
Maybe instead of using lots of big words to say very little at all I could have said something like:
Do you like knots but don’t know how to tell them apart? I can help with that! This book describes my explorations of several ideas that explained some unsolved maths mysteries. I went further than anyone else had gone before! I didn’t quite get everything I wanted, but I got more than I thought possible when I started. Read on to find out more!
Perhaps it wouldn’t have what my examiners needed, but it could have done something to help me.
What could you write about your thesis to excite yourself? If your abstract needs a little oomph to boost your confidence, what kind of blurb could you write?
Doing viva prep reminds me a little of separating rubbish into recycling and non-recycling.
For your rubbish you might have two or more bins to collect things in. You could have a system in place for cleaning tins or bottles, stacking them somewhere and so on. It’s not a good idea to put everything in one container and then get on with things: with a little organisation the whole process works better.
It’s a necessary task so it helps to have a good way to get it done.
Viva prep is also better with a little planning. It pays to structure your time. It pays to set tasks in advance rather than decide what to do as you go along. It’s necessary as well: despite the many, many hours of work on your PhD you now need to prepare for the particular challenge of the viva.
Hopefully you get my point – please don’t let your takeaway be that good viva prep is rubbish!