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Tag: viva expectations

Nathan

Expect Good

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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.

Nathan

What Are You Holding On To?

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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.

Nathan

The Final Thing

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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.

Nathan

Your Viva Is Not An Unknown

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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.

Nathan

Use Your Time

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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.

Nathan

Who Is At The Viva?

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In the UK there have to be at least two examiners, one internal and one external. Both are important. It’s not true that the external has the final say or is senior to the internal. Both will have read your thesis. Both will be prepared. Together they will lead the discussion in the viva and together they will determine the outcome.

An independent chair could be part of the viva process: a member of staff who will observe and confirm that the viva was fair. Some universities always insist on a chair; others require them for certain situations. If there needs to be a chair then they will be there.

You might need your supervisor at your viva. It might feel appropriate to have them be a witness to a final step of your PhD journey. You might need them to make notes about what you discuss or you might need the help of having a supporter in the room.

Or you might need them to not be there: that’s fine too!

Finally, you need to be there. You need to be present, prepared and ready to engage.

Who is at the viva? In short, everyone who needs to be.

Nathan

Different Kinds of Mistakes

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Different kinds of mistakes require different actions in the viva.

If you find a few typos during your viva preparation you don’t need to go out of your way to mention them to your examiners.

If you find a sentence that doesn’t quite make sense you may need to bring it up if you’re talking about that chapter or topic.

If you discover a paragraph or section that is wrong for some reason, it could definitely help to pre-emptively explain what you really meant.

If your examiners ask you about something and you haven’t noticed it before the viva then you need to think carefully in the moment. That’s all. You need to stop, think and respond.

You need to be prepared to acknowledge all kinds of mistakes in the viva, but you don’t need to build up stress about them. Do what you can in preparation, but spend more time getting ready to talk about everything that isn’t a mistake. The focus in the viva is far more on what is right than what is wrong.

Nathan

Either/Or

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I hear a lot of people describe vivas in binary terms.

  • The viva is long or short.
  • Either you’ll love it or hate it.
  • Expect examiners to be fair or critical.
  • Questions are either easy or hard.
  • Preparation is straight-forward or lots of work.
  • You’re either nervous or confident when the day arrives.
  • Overall, the viva is either good or bad!

And of course the truth is that, generally, these either/or positions don’t capture what the viva is really like. Different people will feel different things, and rarely will the viva be one thing or the other.

My viva was four hours long and it felt like it flew by. My examiners were really fair with their questions and they had some very critical comments about the structure of my thesis.

Being nervous means that the viva is important to you, but you can be confident too if you reflect on your achievements and realise the success that you’ve made for yourself.

Nathan

Prove It

Daily Post

In your viva you might be able to handwave some details.

To have time to explore the truly important aspects of your work you might want to skip past tricky things, or make a short point that captures something big. That’s acceptable to do. You can say, effectively, “Trust me. This is the way it is and we don’t need to explore or explain it too much.”

It’s acceptable, but it’s also acceptable for your examiners to say, “Prove it.”

You can use whatever words you want in the viva to explain something. Your examiners can always ask for more detail. While you can say things as simply as you want, you have to be prepared to explore the complex.

Nathan

This Might Not Work

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I was halfway through my PhD journey before I accepted a truth about my research: “I’m trying this, but it might not work.”

I spent weeks trying various methods to get an algorithm to act as I expected.

It took me a long time to decipher what papers meant and then combine them to prove the results I needed.

And I tried different approaches for over two months before I realised that I couldn’t solve the equation I was working on. And I never did solve it.

This might not work.

It could be a helpful thought to hold on to from time to time during a PhD. You can work hard, try your absolute best but fail to get the result. You could read a lot but not find what you wanted, or understand what you need. You could explore your area and leave with more questions than when you started.

Sometimes PhD candidates hold on to the thought as they approach their viva – but that’s a mistake.

By the time you’ve reached the viva you’ve already passed submission. Despite all the problems you’ve faced and times when things haven’t worked, enough has worked for you to complete your thesis.

By then, enough things have worked out for you that the viva will work out too.

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