Daily viva help for PhDs
Viva prep is more.
More reading to help you remember and recall what you need.
More writing to help you bring everything together.
More thinking to help you figure out that you’re ready.
But, for all of these and everything else you do to prepare, only a little more – only a little more work, a little more effort, a little more time. You don’t need much. Not by the time you’ve submitted. Not with so much done already.
A little contrast to this post from November 2020.
When you plan your viva prep, look for things that could slow your progress.
As you plan your prep consider what will help later work. You can choose where you direct your thoughts and efforts. Choose carefully so that you don’t have to over-invest your time. Plan clearly so that you don’t have to do more than is necessary.
Your prep will be imperfect. Getting ready for the viva, there’s no way to account for every bit of information you might need. You can’t anticipate every question you could conceivably be asked by your examiners.
Your prep is built on layers of imperfection too. Your research won’t be perfect. Your skills will not all be at their absolute peak. There will always be ways to make your thesis better.
In all of these things, you don’t need perfection. Your prep doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to make you ready. It needs to make you good enough.
Your prep, while imperfect, can help make you ready for anything you’ll find in your viva.
For a long time I’ve made the following viva prep suggestion in seminars:
Consider writing an edited bibliography. If your bibliography is a body of work that supports your thesis then an edited bibliography is the skeleton of that body, the references that give you the most support. What would they be?
Following the metaphor a little:
Not all references are equally valuable. Not all references are present for the same reason. Useful questions can help identify helpful items from your bibliography, but unfortunately not every bone in the body can prompt one of those questions!
Still, whether you create an edited bibliography or not, do reflect and consider how different references support you and your work in different ways.
Following on from yesterday’s post, it’s easier to finish when you know what success looks like.
You can feel confident you’re ready for the viva if you define in advance what you need to do to prepare.
And to avoid stress, consider the limits you could put on any day that you spend time on getting ready. What is “enough” work for a day that you do prep?
With viva prep you get to decide when, where, what and how.
(the why and who are already taken care of!)
Viva prep doesn’t need precision planning, but a little thought can help sketch out a useful idea of what you need to do to start and when you need to do it. Reflecting on the following questions around submission time should help:
You have to start somewhere, and the good news is that you get to pick.
It’s not for your examiners. It’s not for the viva exactly.
Prep is a series of actions that help to convince you that you’re ready. Some tasks, like reading your thesis to refresh your memory, are useful for everyone. Others, like rehearsal via a mock viva, will be more helpful to some candidates than others. And some tasks, perhaps indexing your thesis with coloured tabs, will only help a few.
However you go about your prep, remember that it has to help you. Don’t start with a to do list that your friend gave you, or a programme of work you saw on a blog. Start with thinking about your needs. Think about the gaps.
Then decide on what you can do to help yourself, and how and when you need to get it done.
You might need to set some for your viva prep. They’re arbitrary in the sense that they’re not fixed by a strict process, but by your needs, your circumstances. For example, there isn’t a deadline for when you must have read your thesis, or you have to have a mock viva. Annotating your thesis can be really valuable, and you can do it whenever you need to. It helps not to do it on the morning of your viva, of course.
It’s useful to think about your prep ahead of time and set milestones for yourself. They’re just for you, to help your prep be as stress-free as possible and guide you into feeling ready for the challenge of your viva. Look ahead to the time around your viva and consider what milestones can help your personal journey to being ready.
Things have gone wrong. We can’t change them. We can’t alter what’s happened already and we don’t know when we can find a space or time that will feel like things are supposed to feel. So for now we have to survive – we have to manage to keep going in difficult circumstances.
There have been times lately, when managing has felt like a struggle. Difficult has felt almost like too much.
Not for the first time in the last year or so I’ve had to start over with myself. Pause, take a day, breathe a lot and really reflect. Then try to figure out what my next steps are. Reboot myself and get going again.
If you’ve been finishing a PhD at this time I can only imagine the angst and overwhelm that must be in the background (and foreground) as you come to your viva. Like me, you might need to reboot yourself to keep going.
Starting over doesn’t mean a blank slate or doing something wholly new. It doesn’t mean you ignore what’s happened or happening. Rebooting means taking the best of what’s come before, and channeling it for what you need now. Take the things that have worked, that could still work, and build on them.
Rebooting isn’t always easy, and it’s rarely ever perfect, but it might be very helpful in the coming year.
Keep going.
Progress during a PhD can be hard to see sometimes. Days and weeks of incremental gains, the occasional epiphany soon pushed into the background by more hard work.
If you’re nearing the end of your PhD, review your records. Maybe your research journal or diary, perhaps a progress record that your institution insisted you keep. Maybe even the remains of notes or plans that have now evolved or been fulfilled. If your records are scrappy in places then work to remember and fill in the blanks.
Whatever you have, reflect on it all and remember: you did this. The successes you’ve found are yours. The results you have flow on from the work you’ve done and the talent you’ve developed.
It’s easy to pause and think, “How did I get here?” As you come to the end of your PhD, do the difficult work of really reflecting on that question. You’ll find confidence in the answer that you can take to your viva.