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Nathan

Supports

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You do the research and write the thesis, but it doesn’t come from nowhere.

You have to be good to do it, and you have to grow as you go along. You have to do the work, but you’re surrounded by help. And you create a significant, original contribution but your research doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

There are essential supports that surround your PhD and help make it what it is. Review your postgraduate journey when submission and the viva are coming:

  1. How have you developed and how are you talented now?
  2. Who do you owe thanks to for helping you?
  3. What research and researchers have most inspired you?

Unpick your supports. Acknowledge them. Say thank you.

Nathan

Questions and Focus

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I recently watched the Tony Robbins documentary I Am Not Your Guru on Netflix. I’d really recommend it; it’s uncomfortable at times, funny at others, but it’s an interesting look at an interesting person and it gets you thinking.

At one point he observes, “Questions control what you focus on.” It made me think of my workshops. I ask people for their viva-related questions at the start, which I’m always happy to answer and help with. Candidates ask me questions that they’re already asking themselves. Frequently asked questions include:

  • What if my mind goes blank?
  • What if my examiners are harsh?
  • What if I can only say “I don’t know”?
  • What if I fail?

These are important questions, and clearly some answers or thoughts could help people feel better and prepare better. I just wonder how the general mood of the viva and viva prep would be if candidates more regularly asked themselves:

  • What will help me be prepared?
  • Where can I find good help?
  • What have I done to put me in a good place?
  • How can I make the most of this opportunity?

Questions control what you focus on. Change your questions, change your focus.

Nathan

Eight Thoughts About Viva Stress

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It’s normal to be a bit nervous about the viva. If you’re persistently feeling stressed as you approach the viva, you need to do something. Here are several ideas to help:

  1. Take a break. Step back from prep and do something you know helps you to relax.
  2. Reflect on how long you’ve been doing your PhD. You’ve not got this far by being lucky.
  3. Reflect on how short the viva is compared to how long you’ve been doing your PhD.
  4. When you can, gently read your thesis and focus on all of the good stuff to begin with.
  5. Visualise yourself crossing the stage at graduation. It’s not far away.
  6. Talk about it with someone you trust, someone who will listen before they offer advice.
  7. Write down exactly what is stressing for you about the viva. What can you do?
  8. Make a list of five things that help you to feel confident. Which of them can you do regularly between now and the viva?

Some people see stress as an endpoint. I try, not always successfully, to use it as a motivator: “I feel stressed. What do I need to do about that?”

Do you feel stressed about the viva? If so, what are you going to do about it?

Nathan

Puzzles & Problems

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During my PhD I became obsessed with certain kinds of puzzles. Killer sudoku is a variant on regular sudoku with different conditions on the grid. I would spend hours and hours playing them. I infected my friends with the killer sudoku bug. For a time we would compete to solve them, nothing but our honour and bragging rights at stake.

We discovered kakuro puzzles. We lost weeks of lunch breaks when a Scrabble clone was launched on Facebook. We turned our brains to becoming office champion. While I wouldn’t say I was champ, I still feel proud at earning 390 points in a two-player game once!

Puzzles are awesome. They teach the skills and processes to help solve problems. A PhD is a mix of puzzles and problems. In some cases you do things to practise a method or explore an already understood idea. Then later you apply what you know to something that’s a problem: something that’s believed to be true or which people think there is something interesting but which isn’t known for certain.

All of my play with killer sudoku and kakuro helped me. My mind raced faster looking for connections in my research. I used notation from puzzles to solve research problems. Bizarrely, playing a lot of Scrabble made it easier for me to focus on problems.

Puzzles and problems go hand in hand. When the viva comes around, you can take all you’ve learned in with you. All of the skill you amass from playing and exploring and researching. It doesn’t go away. It’s right there, a rich resource to draw on.

Think about all of the puzzles and problems you’ve encountered. With everything you do during a PhD, is it really that likely your examiners can find something that will be out of your reach?

Nathan

Questioning Your Bibliography

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At the back of your thesis is a great big list of articles and sources that have helped your research. It can be massive. I’ve asked a lot of people about the size of their bibliography, and I regularly get answers in the region of two to three hundred papers. Someone once told me that their bibliography would have over 800 references!

Your examiners will likely have some questions for you about your literature review and bibliography. While you can’t predict all of them, you can still ask yourself some questions to help your preparation:

  • What are the top ten or twenty papers that have been useful to you?
  • Which papers have been most inspiring to you?
  • Have you cited your examiners, and what did you make of their research?
  • Which papers in your bibliography are most highly regarded?
  • What three or four categories could you group your bibliography in to?

Several hundred papers can be difficult to manage in your head. Questions can help to break that mental map up into something more realistic. These are a start, and are fairly generic. You know your research better than me, so think: what other questions might help?

Nathan

A Good INTRO

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I used to be petrified of public speaking. I would only give talks during my PhD when I absolutely had to. I was always concerned that I would forget something, make a mistake or be asked a question for which I had no answer. I was even nervous about being too nervous!

Then I started a business where I had to present all of the time. My fears went partly because of regularly being in situations where I had to present, but also because I went out of my way to explore ways to give talks. I liked to find out about how to structure talks, particularly the beginnings. I knew that if I could get that right I’d feel good about the rest of the presentation, whether it was ten minutes or two hours.

A few years ago, my good friend Dr Aimee Blackledge shared an effective tool for starting talks with me. The tool is, fittingly, called INTRO and is an acronym to provide structure for the start of a presentation:

  • Interest: start by sharing something that will grab the audience’s attention, a fact, an image, a joke.
  • Need: say why what you’re going to talk about is important. Why does it need to be addressed?
  • Title: share the title of the talk.
  • Range: say something about how long you’ll speak for, what you might cover and how you want to handle questions.
  • Objective: close your introduction by sharing what your goal is with speaking. Is there something you want the audience to do as a result?

I really like how it helps start things off but also leads to a good overview. There’s a nice logic to it, and done well it can be a great start to a presentation. I think the five prompts also give a great format to create a summary of your research when it’s time to prepare for the viva.

  • Interest: how did you become interested in your field of research?
  • Need: what need does your thesis address?
  • Title: what is your thesis’ title, and why?
  • Range: what does your thesis cover?
  • Objective: what do you hope that someone would know, think or do after reading it?

Give INTRO a try when you next prepare a talk, see if it helps. Try it too when your viva is on the way to help break down what your work is all about.

Nathan

8 Thoughts About Viva Questions

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I’ve written a fair bit about viva questions before. I’m exploring different angles on the topic at the moment for future posts and workshops.

Here are eight short thoughts that might be useful:

  1. There are lots and lots of lists of common viva questions. Google it. There’s no reason for anyone to go to the viva ignorant of what could come up.
  2. There are lots and lots of questions you could be asked about your thesis which won’t be on any of those lists.
  3. You can’t practise every potential viva question.
  4. You could reflect and practise a few in particular on explaining your research or methodology.
  5. You can practise answering unexpected questions so you get comfortable in thinking through questions you’ve never considered before.
  6. You don’t have to answer a question immediately without pause or asking for clarification.
  7. You don’t have to answer a question without making a note of it first.
  8. Every question in the viva is being asked for a reason.

Number 5 is important. You can gain confidence by knowing that you can answer questions in viva-like conditions. Mock vivas, conversations with friends, giving seminars – there are lots of opportunities. Go find them.

Nathan

Improbable

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How many times have you answered questions about your research?

How many times have you read a paper and increased your knowledge?

How often have you made a contribution to your field?

How many times have you had a discussion with someone about your work?

How many times have you checked your work?

How many times have you thought about your thesis and how best to write it?

So…

How likely is it that you will be faced with an unanswerable question in the viva? How likely is it that you will freeze or go blank? How likely is it that you’ll realise that something you did is fundamentally wrong? How likely is it that you’ll face one of the nightmare scenarios that people imagine and torture themselves with?

It’s not likely, right?

You did the work. Do the prep. Thrive in the viva.

Nathan

3 Questions You’ll Never Be Asked…

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…but you might get a lot of help from considering them:

  • What do you not want to talk about in your viva?
  • Following on from that, why do you not want to talk about it?
  • What would you say if it did come up?

Your examiners won’t ask these questions, but answers to them will help you. Reflect on your thesis and research journey. What do you not want to focus on?

Nathan

Hypotheticals

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What if your examiners ask you a question and you go blank?

What if you forget something?

What if your examiners don’t agree on the outcome of the viva?

What if you arrive late?

What if you don’t know the answer?

And so on. The consequences for some of these situations seem bad. Some of them are easily coped with in the moment (if you go blank, think more; if you don’t know something, discuss it with your examiners), and some aren’t. But none of these will necessarily happen in the viva. Some of them are not likely at all.

You can’t always control how you feel, but rather than obsess over what-if scenarios, try to give your attention to preparation that helps.

What if you invested your time and energy in being prepared for the viva? What would happen then?

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