The Knack

My dad passed away quite suddenly when I was 17. I first shared this post on what would have been his 70th birthday. He’s been on my mind a lot lately.

When I was little my dad was often self-employed. He had been made redundant from his job when I and my sisters were quite small. For most of our childhood he had a stall at markets around the North West and in Scotland. I remember bagging biscuits at our dining table from huge boxes. I remember bundling tea towels and dusters, taking five and folding them a certain way, throwing a rubber band around them to hold bundles together. Seriously, I remember those afternoons quite fondly.

In the summer holidays my dad would let me help with various games he ran at fairs and carnivals. My favourite game was one where you had to throw a small wooden ball into a metal bucket. The bucket was inside a wooden frame, painted to look like a clown’s mouth; you just stood at a distance and tried to throw the ball in. This was the 1980s, so it was only 20p for three balls, and the spectacular prize was a coconut!

I remember the call still, “Ball in the bucket to win, just a ball in the bucket to win!

It was not easy. For a start, the bucket was pitched at an angle that encouraged the ball to rebound. The balls were ping-pong sized and dense: if you threw too hard they would bounce right back out. If you threw too soft, you might not get the ball in the target at all. Overarm shots always span out.

Ball in the bucket to win, just a ball in the bucket to win!” he would call out and throw the ball and DING! there it would land. Most people paying their 20p had never tried it before, never thought of playing anything like this. It was just something fun to spend 20p on.

There was no great trick, there was no con involved: it was just really hard. My dad had the knack though. He’d mastered this really hard skill. He’d found a challenge he knew was tricky, but spent a lot of time practising. He could throw the ball just so and have it land in the bucket every time. He made it look effortless, but that’s because the effort had been put in over years.

I tried and tried, failing many times, but still remember the first time I got my own DING! I kept going, and while I wasn’t as precise as my dad, I started to reach a point where I could get the ball in the bucket consistently. Practice, experience, nothing more.

Back to the present: your PhD is hard, but there are aspects of it you make seem effortless to others. That’s not to say it’s not still hard to you, but you can do it. You’re practised, you’re experienced. At the viva you can answer a question and engage with a discussion nearly every time because you’ve done so much during your PhD.

After all this time you have the knack.

 

Viva Survivors Summer Sabbatical: I’m taking July, August and September off from new writing to concentrate on other creative projects, so will be sharing a post from the archives every day throughout those months. Today’s post was originally published on February 28th 2018.

Maybe

Maybe you could have done more.

Maybe there was a different approach.

Maybe your examiners will find a problem.

Maybe, maybe, maybe…

Maybe none of these matter.

Maybe there’s something about what you know and what you can do that makes these concerns unimportant for the viva.

Actually, there’s no “maybe” about it.

 

Viva Survivors Summer Sabbatical: I’m taking July, August and September off from new writing to concentrate on other creative projects, so will be sharing a post from the archives every day throughout those months. Today’s post was originally published on December 19th 2017.

Show Them What You Know

At your viva you’re expected to explore your significant original contribution with your examiners, tell them about your PhD journey and demonstrate for them that you are a capable researcher.

Which is simple to understand but sometimes difficult to do!

You have to show your examiners what you know. Show them what you understand. Show them what it means.

Whatever their exact questions are you know the topics they will be interested in. Part of the challenge is being ready and able to respond well, whatever the question might be.

By the viva, you’ve done the work. You’ve done the prep. Take a deep breath and show them what you know.

Meant To Be

Your viva is your viva. It’s what you’re supposed to be doing.

It’s your very own Goldilocks exam: just right for what you’ve done, how long you’ve been doing it, what you’ve written and who you’ve become.

The questions might be unknown before you hear them but they are all for you; they’re centred on your research, your experience, your thesis and you as a researcher.

It’s your viva, it’s for no-one else.

Being nervous is normal but you are exactly where you’re meant to be when you have your viva.

Over The Top!

The viva is big, important and can feel a bit scary. You need to be prepared but that doesn’t mean you have to make heroic efforts to get ready.

  • Reading your thesis once is probably enough!
  • A mock viva and a few conversations is probably enough practice!
  • Reading a few papers and making a few summaries is all you need!

A little reading, a little thinking, a little practice… You don’t need to be over the top with your preparations to be ready for your viva.

If your viva feels big and important that’s because it is.

So are you and so is your work.

Fortunate vs Lucky

Being fortunate means working hard and that hard work paying off.

Being lucky means that you didn’t need to apply yourself for the success you’ve found.

Being fortunate is achieving something through your labour.

Being lucky is getting something through a lottery.

As you get to your viva, be careful of the words you use to describe your progress.

Were you lucky to get this far or are you fortunate to have found the results you have?

Yes, You Can

Can you know what to expect from the viva process?

Yes, you can because there are regulations and stories that describe the viva process. Yours will be unique but you can still know enough to know what to expect.

 

Can you know enough about your examiners to feel confident meeting them?

Yes, you can: talk to your supervisor and check your examiners’ recent publications to get a sense of who they are.

 

Can you be prepared for the viva?

Yes, you can be prepared for your viva! Take time to make a plan and do the work. There’s no shortcuts but also no long and hard tasks either.

 

Can you engage well with your examiners’ questions and respond to their comments?

Yes, you can engage well with your examiners at the viva. You know your stuff, you’ve taken time to prepare and a little rehearsal will help you be ready.

 

Can you succeed at your viva?

Yes, you can.

People Like Us

Seth Godin, one of my favourite people in the world, defines culture as people like us do things like this.

It’s helpful to unpick who “us” is and what “this” is in the context of viva prep.

  • People like your examiners do things like prepare well for your viva.
  • People like your institutional staff do things like provide helpful resources and sessions to help you get ready for your viva.
  • People like your supervisors do things like offer mock vivas and perspectives to help you prepare.

When we consider the bigger culture of the viva and the people like you, the people who have a viva, there are some really big cultural “this”-points to recognise too.

  • People like you do things like succeed at the viva.
  • People like you do things like prepare well for the viva.
  • People like you do things like staying determined, becoming knowledgeable, developing their abilities and building their confidence.

People like you do things like succeed at their viva – then go on to even better things.

Personal Statistics

How do you measure or remind yourself of your confidence?

Do you do that at all?

For a long time I struggled with feeling excessively nervous. A lot of things I read and learned about told me that building up confidence would help: confidence would not get rid of nervousness but it would help to put it into perspective.

For all the little things I tried, I still encountered situations where I felt terrible because of nervousness. The situations – giving a talk, attending a meeting – still went fine, but they were more difficult for me because of how uncomfortable I felt.

A turning point was realising just how much work I had done in the past. If I felt nervous before giving a talk I could remind myself of how many times I had rehearsed it. If I felt nervous before giving one of my regular sessions I could remind myself of how many times I had shared it before and with how many hundreds of researchers.

Over time I realised I was counting many thousands of researchers.

 

I still feel nervous before any session I deliver. That’s OK though. It reminds me that I’m doing something important and I want it to go well.

I now feel confident before any session I deliver. I’m reminded by my numbers: I’ve now delivered over 400 viva help sessions to almost 9000 postgraduate researchers. I’ve published more than 2500 daily posts on this blog. These numbers help remind me of who I am, what I’ve done and what I can do in the current situation.

What stats could you track? What numbers might make a difference to you?

It could be the number of papers you’ve read. It might help to track the number of experiments you’ve run or people you’ve interviewed, depending on your kind of research. Work out the number of days or hours you showed up to do the necessary work of your PhD.

To help your confidence and help yourself find your own meaningful numbers and statistics.

Not Knowing

The more I do, the more I find I don’t know!

This sentiment was shared by a generous participant at a recent viva help webinar I ran. Before I had a chance to respond the chat was filled with thumbs up emojis, hearts and five people writing “Same!” and “Me too!”

 

A thesis takes years of work. A candidate learns and grows and develops – and discovers that there is still more they don’t know. Despite all the work. More papers. More books. More ideas. More questions and more answers to explore.

Not knowing something might feel pretty bad depending on the day or the situation. The viva is perhaps a singularly uncomfortable environment to realise you don’t know something. The weeks and months leading up to then could be pretty hard too. Knowing you have done so much and knowing that there is so much you still don’t know.

(and knowing, in some cases, that there are things you almost certainly will never know)

 

The more I do, the more I find I don’t know!

If this sounds familiar, focus on the first clause: you’re doing something. You know things. You are making something. You are finding things.

Before you focus on what you don’t know, take a long time to examine, explore and record what you know – and remember that this will be enough for your viva.