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Tag: the PhD journey

Nathan

Character Sheets

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In tabletop role-playing games, players have character sheets. These are a way of capturing information about the person you are pretending to be in the game. Are you a warrior or a wizard? What equipment do you have? Character sheets list statistics about the character, measures of how skilful someone is and perhaps key details about their past or their talents.

If all of the above sounds totally unfamiliar then from real life picture a CV or resume. These do something similar to a character sheet. They show what someone has achieved, a shorthand for showing ability and success, essential skills and qualifications. It’s not the whole story, but a helpful summary for reminding someone or sharing key details.

As you prepare for your viva, consider making a character sheet for yourself. List your accomplishments, summarise the skills and talents that make you amazing, and highlight the ways you have levelled up. Summarise what you can do now as a result of your PhD journey.

In a game, a character sheet might describe someone fictional and amazing. For the viva, create something which shows a real, amazing person: you.

Nathan

Now You Can

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If it won’t cause pain or upset, think back to who you were when you started your PhD journey.

Consider what you knew and what you could do, and compare that with your capability today.

Being ready for the viva is partly all the work you’ve done, partly the specific preparations for the viva and partly how you feel about yourself and what you can do. A PhD journey can be long and difficult; sometimes, when reflecting it can be natural to remember the beginnings or the harder moments.

Instead, remember where you are today. Remember the skills, the knowledge, the talent and the success that you have. You are not the person you were. You are not who you were when you began.

Now you can do so much more.

You know so much more.

And you have achieved so much more than when you started.

Nathan

Three Successes

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To build confidence for your viva, write down three successes from your PhD journey. Think back over the years of work and find three things that have been good: maybe things you did well, results that didn’t exist before or ideas that you have developed and shared.

Find three successes and write a little about each, focussing on why they are a success and what you did to make them great. You don’t need to spend long to capture something good.

In fact, you could probably take ten minutes every day to write about three successes from your PhD journey. Between submission and the viva make a habit of looking back and finding three successes from your PhD: make a habit of building your confidence for the viva.

Nathan

Part Of Something

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Remember that as you finish your PhD journey and have your viva that you are part of something.

Several somethings!

  • You are part of a community: there are many people around you who can offer support.
  • You are part of a tradition: lots of vivas happen every year and lots have happened in the past – stories and expectations are not hard to find.
  • You are part of a genealogy of researchers: whatever your path from here on, you can still share your experience and help with future generations, just as you have had help on your journey.

Also remember that your PhD journey is only a part of you: not all of you and not the best of you. As you finish that journey you have to figure out what it really means for your future and what you will do next.

Nathan

Alone

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You are the only person in your viva who can speak for you and your work. The questions and comments from your examiners, the discussion that follows, all of it is is centred on getting you to engage and talk. You, and you alone, can respond.

Before the viva, however, you are not alone – there are many people who can offer you support.

  • Your supervisors provide professional support over a long period of time. As you approach the viva they can share their perspectives and offer a mock viva.
  • Friends and colleagues from your research community can share their stories and listen to your concerns, offering support when able.
  • Friends and family from your non-research life can offer their love and listen. They can help to create a good environment for you to do the work you need to do. Share what you really need.

You get to the viva, alone, but supported. You’re the only one in a position to respond, buoyed by the support and help of many others. You, and you alone, can – and will – rise to this challenge.

Nathan

Impatience & The Viva

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It’s not wrong to want your viva to be done. That’s a natural response to the challenge and the situation.

But don’t try to rush your viva so it’s over as soon as possible. Don’t try to get every thought out as quickly as you can.

Likewise viva prep takes time. Give yourself a break before you begin. Take your time to do it well and take your time to think.

Perhaps if you feel impatient for your prep to be done or your viva to be over, stop and – if you can – think for a moment about what the real issue is. What’s driving how you feel? And what can you do about it?

Nathan

An Imperfect Thesis

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“Submitted is perfect” was a piece of thesis writing advice that jumped out to me on Twitter a few weeks ago. I wish I could remember where I saw it, though I imagine the person sharing it was not unique in expressing the idea. There are several ways that the advice could be interpreted, some very helpful and some much less so.

It was intended to mean that getting a thesis in is a big enough goal: a “perfect” thesis is one that is handed in on-time rather than one which is “perfectly written”.

A less helpful reading could be that a thesis is perfect when it is submitted – and that if someone receives corrections there must be a terrible problem or situation.

It’s important to know what corrections are. A typo. A passage that requires editing. An update. A change of structure to a paragraph or a reframing of ideas. Corrections are requested when there is something needed to make the thesis better – but only because the examiners recognise the value of the contributions within the thesis.

Corrections are one more step in the PhD process, not a sign of an imperfect thesis, nor a sign of a problem with your work.

Nathan

Manage To Keep Going

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Survive means manage to keep going in difficult circumstances.

Just difficult. Not negative. Not a struggle.

I use the definition a lot in my work to emphasise that surviving the viva doesn’t mean the situation is automatically bad or overwhelming, or that chances of success are slim. Survive helps to put the viva in context.

But there are other ways we could apply it to a PhD journey:

  • It could mean that someone learned how to cope with a bad situation.
  • Or persisted despite an awful series of events.
  • Or got through their PhD even when they didn’t enjoy it.

And it could mean that someone simply found their way. They found obstacles, they worked around them. Some were big, some were small, but they made it.

 

I would never encourage someone to forget the hard parts of a PhD. “Put it out of your mind,” isn’t in my toolbox of tips. But if there are harder parts to your progress, more stressful, more emotionally challenging, I would suggest that giving focus to them might not help you – particularly as you get ready for your viva. It could help you more to focus less on how you managed, and instead remember that you kept going. You made it through.

And if you keep going a little longer you’ll finish your PhD journey.

Nathan

Putting In The Hours

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Five years ago, on what would have been my dad’s 70th birthday I published The Knack. It was a personal piece of writing for this blog, but also one with a point:

…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.

The knack being know-how, a skillset, the knowledge, the means to just do something. It’s a shorthand for saying “you can just do it.”

 

Five years on, and today would have been my dad’s 75th birthday.

As I wrote in The Knack, for part of my childhood my dad worked as a market trader. In school holidays I would go to help and think it was a great adventure. Waking in the dark, flasks of tea, being given “grown-up jobs” of sorting things on the stall, selling things to customers, and joking with other stallholders and my dad. There was a lot of fun there.

And a lot of work. A lot of work. I remember my dad emphasising that. He wanted me to appreciate the amount of work that goes into something: the setup, the effort, the attention to detail, how you tell others and how you keep focussed.

This has some value for thinking about your viva. Remember all of the work you have put into your PhD by submission and viva prep time. It’s easy to simply acknowledge it as thousands of hours, but also remember what those hours were spent doing.

Learning, growing, discovering, writing, sharing and making something.

By the time you have your viva you have the knack for being a good researcher, but don’t forget how you got to where you are. What you did, what you achieved – and who helped you along the way.

Nathan

Untangling

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My PhD research was about something called knot theory. The basic question in this topic can be explained, essentially, as “if you loop up a piece of elasticated string and glue the ends together, can you tell if it’s fundamentally the same or different from one that I make?”

It’s not hard to visualise, I think, but wow is it hard to actually get answers!

You need 1-variable polynomials of unoriented knots and 2-variable polynomials of oriented links. You need about 150 years of theory and new people all the time researching niche cases. You need invariants, polynomials, equations and Reidemeister moves. You could use arc invariants, stacked k-tangles and skein relations. You need to know your homology from your homotopy and you need to know what, when and why you use all these things.

Sorry. You don’t need to know all this. I did!

 

It was a lot to keep straight at times. And not all of it was directly relevant to my research, my thesis or my viva. As I was writing my thesis and then preparing for my viva, it helped me to untangle all of these terms and be sure of what they meant, what I needed them for and – in some cases – what I didn’t need.

You don’t need to know all of my stuff. You need to know your stuff for your viva. So take some time to think through what you need to be clear about. What do you need to check? What basics do you need to go over one more time? And what can you file away as probably important?

You need to know your stuff. So make sure you do.

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