reflection – Page 28 – Viva Survivors

July 1, 2018August 14, 2018 Nathan

Postscript

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What message would you add to the end of your thesis?

You don’t have time to do every follow-up, or advance every idea. Perhaps you can leave that to someone else. Perhaps there is a new perspective that you have on the whole work, and a short note could set those thoughts out. Maybe there is a problem with something in your thesis, but you don’t quite know how to talk about it on the page. Or it could be that you just want to thank some people.

Reflect on your thesis. What postscript would you add?

PS: Now you’ve reflected on this, consider making some notes or even writing a message. Your examiners are unlikely to ask you anything like this directly, but this kind of reflection and review is useful to see what you think about your thesis now it’s done.

June 20, 2018August 10, 2018 Nathan

Toppling

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In Jenga, whatever your intentions, you might knock the tower down at any moment. Your actions or a misplacement by the last player might make things so unstable that the tower can only fall.

It’s tempting to think of the viva is a precarious situation, but your thesis is not a Jenga tower, and the viva is not a game.

Questions from examiners aren’t like pulling bricks out. Your answers aren’t going to make your work fall apart. Discussion can bring in some wobbles, but your work is more than a tower of bricks. You designed this structure, it didn’t just come together out of a box.

June 11, 2018August 10, 2018 Nathan

SCAMPERing Through Your Thesis

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I like acronyms as useful tools, particularly for unpicking things or prompting thoughts. Last year I shared a post on how to use the tool SCAMPER to think about how to extend the research you’ve done for your PhD. Recently it struck me that SCAMPER could be useful as a reflection and review tool.

Today’s post is a series of questions inspired by SCAMPER to get you reflecting about your research. Use these with journalling or free-writing to spark some thoughts about your thesis.

Substitute: what did you change from something someone else had done?
Combine: what ideas did you bring together in your thesis?
Adapt: how have you altered the approach that you started with?
Magnify: what areas did you decide to focus on?
Put to other use: what pre-existing tools or ideas did you use?
Eliminate: how did you simplify things as your work developed?
Rearrange: as your thesis was nearing completion, what changes did you have to make?

Use these questions to think about your research and thesis. Reflecting on the three or more years of work you’ve completed is an essential part of the viva prep process.

June 1, 2018August 10, 2018 Nathan

Fading Letters

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After nearly ten years since the end of my PhD, and countless times that my thesis has been in and out of the protective wrapper I keep it in, the gold letters on the spine are starting to gradually fade away.

Which got me thinking about the material in there. Is that disappearing too? How valuable is it now? Has it been superseded, extended, built on or ignored in favour of other things? I don’t know. I was a pure mathematician, and I think we like to think of ourselves as making permanent contributions to knowledge. Proof is proof!

Although I got there first, someone else could find something even more valuable. I’d be referenced (I hope) and my work would have served it’s purpose, but that’s that. Things change. Things move on.

How long will your accomplishments matter? How long until someone does something bigger, better or just different? It’s worth thinking about. It’s not self-defeating, it’s just honest. Help yourself define what your contribution really means. Why does it matter? And for how long?

And how might you frame that in the viva?

May 31, 2018August 7, 2018 Nathan

Five Day Thesis Breakdown

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Your thesis is an expression of your research. But in the viva, and at any time when someone asks you about your work, you can’t just hand them this great book you’ve made and say, “Read it!”

I like thinking about ways to help candidates reflect on their work. I like exploring ways to help people explain their ideas concisely. Here’s a plan of how to spend five days in short activities to break down your thesis and your research contribution.

Day 1: Describe the Why-How-What of your PhD in a single page, no more than 300 words.

Day 2: Use Day 1’s page to write a single paragraph about your PhD. Try to keep it under 100 words. Remove the inessential.

Day 3: Use Day 2’s paragraph to write a sentence describing your PhD – no more than 20 words. You’ll never be able to say everything, so don’t try. What can you get across?

Day 4: Use the work of the previous three days to write down five words. What are the themes of your work? Think about where it all started, how you did it and what your outcomes are.

Day 5: Write down one word. The Big Picture. What is it that stands out?

It’s unlikely your examiners will ask you to describe your research in a single word, but they will ask you to talk about your work. An exercise like this can help you think about your PhD a lot before the viva. You might never say to someone, “In one word, my research is all about…” but I think you’ll get something valuable from following this process.

May 8, 2018August 7, 2018 Nathan

Devil’s Advocate

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Exploring how your research could be better while you prepare for the viva can be interesting. You’re not looking for fatal flaws, just inspecting your work and asking some critical questions. You’re not trying to anticipate criticisms in the viva, just think clearly about what you’ve done and what you could have done.

For example, thinking back, how could my PhD research have been better?

I could have learned C++ to make a good computer program for an algorithm I created.
I could have applied my results to other cases to see what was interesting.
I could have completed the big table of results that no-one else had done.
I could have finished those three other chapters.

Make sure you couple any critique with reasons why you didn’t do something different. So why didn’t I do any of these things that might have made my research better? Respectively:

I didn’t have time.
I didn’t think of some of those cases until I was writing up.
I wasn’t sure it was worth the effort.
I didn’t have time and wasn’t sure if there was something thesis-worthy in the ideas.

It could feel awkward to ask yourself how to make your work better, or ask yourself what’s wrong with it. Really, you’re just giving another check. It can also help to spot little things that need support with more ideas. Looking at your thesis with a different mindset is valuable. You’ve done a lot of good work by the time you submit.

Playing Devil’s Advocate is just taking a step back. You’re not thinking “This is rubbish, what’s wrong?” but “This is great, could it be even better?”

May 6, 2018August 7, 2018 Nathan

There’s Always More

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Worried about whether or not you’ve done enough prep? Worried if you find a reference after submission that seems like it would be a good addition to your thesis? Worried that there’s something else that you just have to do before the viva?

Whenever I get stressed out and think I need to read more or do more, I remember a little line from Ecclesiastes 12:12. Probably 2500 years old and still relevant:

“…There is no end to the writing of books, and too much study will wear you out.”

You could read one more paper. You could check one more detail. Make one more note. But do you really need to?

At some point you just have to stop. Weigh it against everything else you’ve done, and you’ll find the right point.

Don’t exhaust yourself just because you’ve found one more thing you could do.

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