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Tag: viva confidence

Nathan

Helpful Mindsets

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A famous saying, or an approximation of it: if you think you can or think you can’t, you’re probably right.

Our mindset shapes how we view things and how we do things. If you don’t think something will work, you might not do your best to see if it will. If you’re confident of success then you’ll find a way even if you experience setbacks.

What kinds of mindsets could help with the viva?

  • For submission: done is better than perfect.
  • For prep: small tasks add up.
  • For the viva itself: I am here to respond to my examiners’ questions (whatever they might be).
  • For corrections: get them done, then move on!

A mindset, a sentence, a little saying – however you frame them they can motivate action and produce results. They are not the actions, but the framing for them.

For example, done is better than perfect puts limits on drafting and redrafting. It expresses an end-point. It gives a nudge for action – but then you have to take that action. You have to set a timetable, you have to do the work and decide when you stop.

I am here to respond to my examiners’ questions (whatever they might be) reminds you of what you have to do in the viva. To be ready you’ll need to rehearse, read and feel confident in what you do and say.

A mindset leads to action, the action embeds the mindset: a positive cycle that can lead to good outcomes.

Nathan

One Weird Trick

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I can’t believe I’ve never shared this before!

It’s this one weird trick that helps with the viva!!

One thing that universities, examiners and PhD graduates don’t want you to know!!!

Whatever discipline you are in, however long you have to go before your viva and whatever you feel about your viva, this one weird trick will help!!!!

Are you ready?

Do the work.

That’s it, the one weird trick that helps with the viva: do the work.

Take your time, but do the work. Feel frustrated, but do the work. Procrastinate, but take the time to do the work.

Have questions? Do the work to find out the answers. Unsure about something? Do the work to ask someone who can give you certainty. Feel unprepared for your viva? Do the work to feel ready.

And sometimes it’s really hard! Sometimes it is hard to get up and do the work you need to do because you’re tired, or you’re nervous or you just don’t know what you want or where you’re going.

There are even times where you know you need to do something but you don’t what that something is!

Then you have to do the work to figure it out.

 

Ask for help. Plan your prep. Rehearse for your viva. Explore expectations. Maybe finish your thesis first!

But do the work.

Do the work because it’s the one weird trick that really will help with everything.

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

Generating Confidence

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What could you do to boost or maintain your confidence for your viva?

  • Think about your research and focus on the good stuff?
  • Read about your examiners and get a sense of who they are?
  • Select an outfit that helps you feel good for your viva?
  • Reflect on the successes from your PhD journey?
  • Create and listen to a playlist of awesome music?
  • Have a mock viva to convince yourself that you know your stuff?
  • Highlight your strengths as a researcher?

Confidence helps put nervousness in perspective, and it’s to be expected that you might feel nervous for your viva. It matters. It’s important. Confidence won’t remove nervous thoughts, but it will help you to remember why you’re there.

There’s no magic pill for confidence, no simple button press. Thankfully, there are many things you could try. What else could you do to build your confidence?

Nathan

Five Big Viva Mistakes

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First, a candidate can think that vivas are random. It’s true that you won’t know what will happen exactly until you get to yours, but there are general expectations that can help you understand the process.

Second, a candidate can think of examiners as opponents. This just isn’t the case: examiners are prepared, they ask questions and some of those questions could be tough, but that doesn’t make them your enemy.

Third, a candidate could believe that they are finished at submission. The PhD journey is a good foundation for the viva, but the viva is a particular challenge; there’s lots of prep work that can make a difference.

Fourth, a candidate could believe that corrections are a failure. It just isn’t so. Corrections are more work and might not feel fair – but they’re a part of the process for most candidates and not connected with failing at all.

Fifth, a candidate could believe that they aren’t good enough to succeed. But how else could someone get to submission other than by achieving enough along the way? How else could they write a thesis if they weren’t good enough to do the work?

 

Five big mistakes. Five simple remedies.

Find out about expectations. Understand the role of examiners. Invest time in preparation. Accept corrections as part of the process. Reflect on your journey to build your confidence.

Nathan

The Viva Needs More Understanding

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Candidates need to know more about examiners: how they prepare, what’s involved, what they’re asking, what they might ask and do and why.

Examiners need to know more about candidates and the PhD journey in the 2020s: they need to understand the particular thesis they’re looking at, the general experience of PGRs, the impact of COVID and more.

Supervisors need to understand the viva situation: they need to have a good handle on expectations, what helps in preparation, they have to grasp their candidates’ situations and advise them well.

And then there are researcher-developers, policy-makers, regulation-writers, awesome administrators and sensational support staff.

The viva needs more understanding. Or perhaps it is better to say that if everyone involved knew more about it then the viva, how it happens, how it’s prepared for and how it’s talked about could be better for everyone involved.

 

What can you do to improve your understanding about the viva before you have yours? Who could you ask? What do you need to know? And when you’ve been through the process, who could you share your experience with to help others with their understanding?

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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