Daily viva help for PhDs
You don’t need to find excuses for when you talk to your examiners.
You do need to be ready to explain when they ask you something.
The reasons for your research, your knowledge and your thesis help explain how you have got to this point. You don’t need to excuse anything. Your explanations, offered honestly, will be enough.
That’s the viva. At and after submission there’s still lots to do, but at and after the viva there’s hopefully only a little way to go. Still work, but not too much.
The viva is the beginning of the end of your time as a postgraduate researcher. If you’re tired at this stage remember that there’s not far to go, not much longer you need to keep going.
Prepare for it, enjoy it if you can and finish the work you started.
It’s two years since my world changed, just before the first pandemic lockdown in the UK. Two years ago today I shared Interesting Times, thoughts on where I was and where I might be going in the weeks that would follow. A year ago, things had changed and were continuing to change, in ways that a year earlier I couldn’t have predicted. I wrote and shared Still Interesting Times.
And now it is 2022.
In the last year I’ve continued to work from home. I’ve been jabbed three times. I’ve seen my work and life continue to be impacted. I’ve avoided COVID but cared for my wife and daughter while they were poorly with it a few months ago. I’ve been fortunate to keep serving PhD candidates via their universities and sometimes through webinars I’ve set up myself. I’ve been fortunate to keep writing, keep helping and keep responding whenever anyone gets in touch.
What stands out to me when I think about the last two years?
Everyone needs help. Helping others helps us to grow too. So when you can: help. When I think about the viva it reminds me that there are lots of people who need help and lots of people who could help.
I’m here too! This blog is updated every day, but you can email me or tweet me if you have questions. There’s almost five years of posts on the blog. There are over sixty viva stories in the podcast archive.
We live in “interesting” times. We always did, of course, but they’ve become even more interesting. More challenging. More surprising. Sometimes, more upsetting.
If you’re reading this though then, like me, you’re still here. Still learning. Still growing. Still making mistakes and persevering. So far, you have managed to keep going in difficult circumstances – and difficult might be an understatement in the last two years.
Get help if you need it, offer it to others if you can, but keep going.
The viva is a discussion driven by questions from your examiners. Every question is an opportunity for you to share your work and show your capability.
Every question is an opportunity for you to demonstrate what you did, what you know or what you can do. Every question is a step closer to finishing and passing.
If any question causes you to stumble, to freeze, to forget, then you’ll be alright. Another opportunity will present itself.
Every question is an opportunity in the viva, but there will be far fewer questions and opportunities than those you’ve already answered, responded to or made the most of on your PhD journey. The viva itself is one more opportunity to learn, grow, develop and show your ability as a researcher.
So make the most of it.
Over the last two years of your PhD journey I can imagine that there’s a lot that hasn’t gone according to plan.
That’s always the way with a PhD. You prepare and you think and you plan and then you work. As you work things change, for one reason or another – sometimes even in positive ways – but never quite according to plan.
But in these last two years things might not have gone to plan for some fairly big, world-changing reasons. Your research and the course of your PhD might have shifted a lot because of the pandemic. Access to supervisors, materials, resources and even your department might have been restricted. Day-to-day life might, at times, have been disrupted to the point where you just had to stop your research or change course completely.
While life continues to move ever on, and hopefully in a positive direction, the shadow of the last two years might fall over your thesis and your viva. Missed opportunities. Projects halted. Plans changed. Now you have to present your thesis and defend it.
If at times this worries you then remember: your examiners lived through this time too. They know what has happened. They know what an impact it could have on your work. They will understand.
As you prepare, reflect on the changes to your plans. How have your plans changed? What would you have hoped for from your original plans? What do the changes really mean for your thesis?
Importantly, do what you can to remind yourself that despite all of the changes and problems you still did the work. You have still done something that matters. It’s different to what you had planned but it’s still enough.
What could your viva be like? It could be lots of things!
It could be four hours long but feel like it’s over in half that, like mine felt to me. It could begin with a chance for you to summarise what you’ve done or with an open question from one of your examiners. It could be that you are sat around a seminar room table with your examiners or that you’re talking to each other over video and at a great distance.
There’s a lot of variety to the viva. When you account for all of the weird one-in-a-million cases, like someone (me) standing for their four hour viva, the chief expectation for vivas is that they are good.
Expect your viva to be good. Expect your thesis to be well-received. Expect your examiners to be good and prepared. Expect that you’ll receive good questions.
Expect yourself to be good enough.
We have a fireplace in our living room that looks like a coal fire. It’s not. It’s a gas fire.
It’s not connected up. The previous owners of the house had it disconnected and we’ve never needed it. We use the mantlepiece to stand pictures and ornaments.
In front of our not-fireplace we have a shiny metal stand with a set of fireplace tools. Tongs for moving coal, a brush and shovel for sweeping ash, a poker to stoke the coal fire.
Again, the coal fire is fake, the fireplace doesn’t work and we have a set of tools just to one side that we never use. We don’t need any of it! And yet we keep it all the same.
All of which is a long way to get to ask you: what are you holding on to that you don’t need any more?
Maybe you’ve submitted your thesis and have been holding on to an idea that you didn’t quite finish exploring.
Perhaps you’re a little stuck in your prep focussing on parts of your work that just aren’t important.
Or it could be that you’re holding on to an idea of who you are, what you can or can’t do, and that idea isn’t helping you any more.
It might be hard to let go sometimes. But if you consider what you’re holding on to, even if you can’t get rid of it completely, perhaps you can reflect and see what will help you more.
What’s the final thing you need to do before submission?
What’s the final piece of information about your examiners that will help you feel better about them?
What’s the final thing you need to know about the viva?
What’s the final question you’ll have for your supervisor?
What’s the final task you’ll do as you prepare for your viva?
What’s the final thing you’ll do on the day to help you feel ready?
Getting started isn’t necessarily always easy, but sometimes it’s as simple as doing something. Finishing isn’t necessarily always hard, but sometimes it helps to know the final thing you might cross off your list.
You can’t know in advance what your examiners will ask for every question. You can’t know how long it will be exactly. You won’t know what parts of your thesis they think need changing, amending or updating. You can’t know how you will feel when you’re there.
But you know what it’s all about. Your thesis is a guide to what might come up. A guide doesn’t tell a person everything, but it lays out what is important. You can know many of the topics that will come up in your viva because you wrote your thesis. You can know what happens in vivas because there are regulations for your institution and expectations in the wider academic community for what vivas are supposed to be like.
You can’t know everything about your viva in advance. That doesn’t mean your viva is an unknown.
You don’t know how much time you’ll have in your viva. However long it is, it’s not worth stressing or obsessing. The best thing you can do is use the time that you have well.
Use your time to listen, pause and collect your thoughts.
Use your time to make notes if that will help.
Use your time to ask questions to clarify an examiner’s line of thinking.
Use your time to take a break.
Use your time to engage with the discussion, respond to questions and share your research.
Don’t focus on how long or short your viva might be. Instead, focus on how you can make the most of the opportunities you have in the viva.