Daily viva help for PhDs
Not want, need.
What do you need for your viva?
What do you need?
When you figure out a list of your needs you can start to figure out how you can meet those needs – or meet them as much as possible.
What do you need? Then what can you do?
The process and the goal.
Getting ready means reading your thesis, asking questions, checking things, making notes and building confidence. Being ready means feeling certain that your viva will be successful.
Before you sit down to get ready, think ahead to what you want to feel when you are ready. What does being ready mean for you? What would you have done? What would convince you that you’re ready for your viva?
When you have a sense of what it would mean for you to be ready for your viva, you can plan and do your preparations much more easily.
Questions and comments in the viva are supposed to be fair, but they could also be tough.
You might forget something. You might not know something. You might disagree with your examiners. You might be surprised. You might need time to reflect and think.
All of these are understandable, but faced with a tough question or comment you could default to certain behaviours:
These are the classic responses to troubling situations. They won’t serve you well in the viva. They won’t help you to engage with a tough question and could only make things worse for you and the discussion. However, you could always:
You can’t choose the questions you’ll be asked in your viva – but you can decide in advance how you would like to engage with your examiners.
You don’t have to freeze at, flee from or fight with tough questions.
Take a moment to figure it out instead.
The viva’s not the first time you’ve responded to questions about your work.
It’s not the first time in your PhD journey you’ve been tested.
You have to have risen to challenges many, many times to get to submission.
And your viva is not the first ever viva! Lots of people around you – and people who you don’t know on the internet – have experiences that can help you unpick what to do and how you could feel about your upcoming viva.
Again and again you’ve worked hard to get to this stage of your PhD. A little more will help you finish.
An audience doesn’t see the preparation and planning that goes into a talk. They might appreciate that work because of the effect it creates in the talk, but they don’t see it. They might not fully understand just how much work has been invested or even know some of the steps that have lead to the successful talk.
Reflecting on the invisible work of a PhD and a thesis is a useful activity for viva preparation. Even though you wrote your thesis, by the time you see the final collection of chapters – and given just how much time has been spent – you can forget what efforts you’ve put in.
You can forget the personal development. The setbacks and successes. The dedication you’ve invested.
To build your confidence for the viva and review what you did, reflect on the invisible work. Remind yourself of all you’ve done to produce your impressive thesis.
(sometimes this even extends to blog writing, when you can write a post and only realise when you come to share it that you have written on the topic with the same title two years earlier!)
In your thesis, whatever the topic, whatever the structure, you’re trying to persuade your audience of something.
In your viva you are adding to the work of your research and the words in your thesis to persuade your examiners. You want them to believe the truth: you did the work and it has the value they’ve understood when they read your thesis.
Whatever their questions, you’re working to persuade them that you have ability and knowledge and your thesis is good enough.
Between submitting your thesis and succeeding in the viva you have to persuade yourself that you have ability, knowledge and a good thesis. Depending on your journey, your background and your circumstances when getting ready, persuading yourself that you really are good enough could be the hardest task of your PhD.
But that’s what you have to do.
And hard as it might be, given your experience so far, it’s a challenge you will rise to. Given everything else you’ve done, you can do this too.
Viva confidence can come from reflecting on the years you’ve invested into your research and thesis. The journey has to show progress, personal growth and development and times that you’ve succeeded in your goals.
Looking back could also show you times when things didn’t work out, or when you faced setbacks. Particularly given the last few years you might remember the impact of the pandemic, both personally and professionally.
When you reflect it’s good to consider both the high points and the low. Use specific questions to unpick how a situation had an impact and what it’s lead to now.
Highs and lows, peaks and valleys, whatever we call them, every journey of growth and progress has them. No plan goes unchallenged, there are always obstacles to overcome. But if you’re looking back on your PhD and getting ready for your viva, remember that you have overcome your challenges. You have done enough.
Don’t dig too deep into anything painful, but also remember that you have made it through your low points of your PhD. Keep going now and you will succeed at your viva.
Your examiners are looking for a significant, original contribution in your thesis and a conversation with the capable researcher who did the work. For you to meet their expectations you don’t need to have super-researcher powers…
This doesn’t need to be you. It can’t be anyone. There isn’t a researcher in the world who can meet the impossible standards that worry might set. Your examiners don’t need a hero in the viva: they need a human, capable and dedicated researcher.
They’re looking for you.
It’s one of the most common things people say about the viva.
I believed my examiners would grill me but instead we just talked about what I had done…
I thought I would go blank but it was just good to be discussing my research…
I expected that I would be there for hours and hours, but it was all done by 1pm…
In my experience there is a massive mis-match between what PhD candidates generally expect from their viva and what happens when they meet their examiners. Typically, this is because the candidate expects it is going to be far more dire an experience than it actually is!
It’s good that vivas tend to work out well, but it would be better if people went to them knowing more of what to expect and thus get ready in a more positive frame of mind.
So what can you do? Don’t just listen to the person on the internet. Talk to your friends. Talk to your colleagues. Talk to your supervisors. Read the regulations. Read blog posts and articles describing real experiences. Through all of this try to arrive at a good, positive idea of the viva that is ahead of you.
It can take a candidate some time to read their whole thesis. A mock viva is hours of prep and then the event itself. Sitting with your thesis to add notes to the margins and other annotations can also take a while.
These kinds of work are necessary. There’s no substitute for them but you can also improve your preparation – and how ready you feel – by doing little things too.
There’s a lot more you could do. Little things add up. There are big tasks you have to complete to be ready for the viva, but lots of small tasks that help too.