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Tag: viva prep

Nathan

Background Checks

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What do you need to know about your examiners? What will help you to feel happy about them being the ones asking questions in your viva?

Google is your friend. You can check out your examiners’ staff pages and their publication histories. You can see what they’ve presented at conferences and uncover their interests. You might even find out a little about them as a person, particularly if they’re active on social media.

This can all help give a boost to your confidence for how they’ll treat you on the day of your viva. You want to be examined by clever, reasonable people and a little research can help convince you of that.

Remember that Google works both ways. Think about what someone would find out about you if they looked. If your external wanted to know more about the researcher behind this great thesis they’ve been reading, what would they find?

Nathan

The Big Red Button

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Let’s say you could take a big red button to the viva: a kind of game-show like buzzer, and whenever you wanted to you could press “pause” on everything. Would you use it, if you had one? Why might you press pause? What circumstances would have to come up?

  • A quick press of the button could give you a few seconds to remember something that’s slipped your mind.
  • You could use a moment to prepare a devastating response to a critical question from your examiners.
  • Or take as long as you like to compose yourself if your mind goes completely blank.

You don’t have a big red button. But you can still imagine situations where you might want one. So what will you do instead?

Think: what can you do now to prepare for things that might stress you out? What can you do in the viva to help be your best self?

Nathan

Start Small

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Day one of viva preparation doesn’t have to be re-reading your thesis and exploring your examiners’ work and writing summaries and practising questions and sticking in Post-its AND reading 101 blog posts about how to do everything!

Day one can just be ten minutes thinking about what you need to do before the viva.

There are big tasks on the journey to the viva, but you can start small. It doesn’t have to be everything all at once.

Give yourself time to think, time to prep, time to get things done.

Small steps will get you there.

Nathan

♥ Your Thesis

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I think you can love your viva, but probably only after the fact. Before it you can be excited, but you’ll still be wondering, “What if…?” about something. You can look forward to it, and it will probably go well, but you can’t love your viva until you’re all done.

Roses are red/Violets are blue/You’ve got this far/You’ve got this too!

You can only love the viva after the fact, but you can love your thesis and your research before you finish your PhD. Maybe you don’t feel that way now.

Find your reasons. Look for them. Don’t just read your work and try to memorise things. Look for reasons to be proud. Look for reasons to be happy. Look for reasons to shout from the rooftops that your thesis is amazing and you love it!

Get to the point where you ♥ your thesis and I think you’ll ♥ your viva too.

 

Nathan

Ask For Opinions

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Ask your supervisors what they think about your examiners, your work and vivas in general.

Ask friends who have had their viva what they think you should do to prepare, what their viva was like and how they felt about it.

Ask friends who haven’t had their viva about your work, your field, and generally anything you think will help.

You can always ask for opinions, but remember you get to choose what to act on.

Nathan

Overprepared

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Can you be overprepared for the viva? I’m not sure what that would look like.

Can you waste time on activities that don’t really contribute much to your viva preparedness? Sure.

Can you focus so much on prep that you start to stress yourself out? Definitely.

Perhaps the best question to start exploring this topic is “How will you know you’re prepared?”

Set some criteria. Figure out tasks that will help meet them. Do the work.

Be prepared.

Nathan

Things I Don’t Know

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There are lots of things I don’t know about the viva.

I don’t know if there’s any great differences between the vivas of part-time and full-time PhDs.

I don’t know how well vivas over Skype work compared to vivas in person.

I don’t know what percentage of people submit a thesis-by-publication.

I don’t know all of the regulations for all of the universities in the UK. (but I’m working on it!)

And I don’t know what percentage of candidates fail their viva, because universities are very reluctant to share that sort of data.

I have theories or ideas about all of these; hunches based on incomplete information, or ideas about how to get more stats. I’d like to explore these topics and many others, I just need to find the time to do it.

But the information is out there.

On smaller scales, your personal scale, the information is out there. There are regulations for your institution. You have a supervisor who can help shape your expectations. There are graduates you can talk to about viva experiences.

Figure out what you don’t know about the viva, then get to work finding out more.

(and I’ll do the same!)

Nathan

Clearing Out The Vague

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Reading and re-reading your thesis in preparation for the viva could show passages that don’t quite make sense.

You could read a sentence and know what you meant, but also know that the sentence doesn’t communicate it fully. You may even find a paragraph that leaves you scratching your head…

…what does this mean? What was I trying to say?…

…and while you might not feel good about finding something unclear, you don’t have to feel too bad about it either. It’s unlikely you’ve found something that would disqualify your thesis or you. You just need to clear out the vague words before you meet your examiners.

You can’t submit a pre-corrected version of your thesis but you could:

  • Write a short note in the margin;
  • Stick a Post-it Note with corrected text over the passage;
  • Create a mind map about the topic;
  • Check your definitions and jargon;
  • Practise explaining the area with your friends.

There’s a lot you can do to make vague words more clear. Exploring is always better than just hoping your examiners won’t notice.

Nathan

The Anti-Top Ten Top Fives

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Lists can be a good way to start reflections and summaries. I’ve previously shared Top Ten Top Fives and Ten More Top Fives as prompts to get candidates thinking about the best of their research. They can be a nice way to highlight valuable aspects of your PhD ahead of the viva.

But can we find something useful in taking another point of view? Looking at the negative or the worst aspects? Let’s see!

  1. Top Five Bad Papers You’ve Read!
  2. Top Five Worst Talks You’ve Attended!
  3. Top Five Frustrating Challenges Of Your PhD!
  4. Top Five Typos In Your Thesis!
  5. Top Five Examiners You Don’t Want!
  6. Top Five Mistakes You Made!
  7. Top Five Changes You Would Make!
  8. Top Five Things You Don’t Want In Your Viva!
  9. Top Five Ways You Could Improve Your Skills!
  10. Top Five Improvements You Could Make To Your Thesis!

Some of these might seem silly but remember: this is the start of a reflection or summary.

After you list these details, keep going. Ask why. Ask how. Ask what you learned from your mistakes. Think about how you overcame your challenges. Why were those papers bad? How would you improve your thesis?

Simply dwelling on the negative isn’t often helpful, but you can use it as a springboard to something great.

Nathan

Transfer And Final

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I didn’t have a transfer viva at the end of my first year. This was nearly fifteen years ago; I had a forty minute meeting with my second supervisor. He read my ten-page summary of what I’d done in my first year, asked a few questions and then said, “Well, that all seems fine.”

From listening to other researchers’ transfer viva stories I’m aware this isn’t always as simple. A real sense of “will I pass?” can be the case for some people. If that was your story, or if you just wonder how the two events might compare, remember that the transfer viva and the PhD viva are two different events with two different purposes. They might have some similarities, but those are structural. The why behind them really is different.

The PhD viva is likely to be longer than your transfer; you’ve done more by the end of the PhD, so there is naturally more to cover. How you felt about the transfer, positive or negative, can influence how you feel about the PhD viva. If you feel like the transfer was a terrible thing then I can understand how the PhD viva would seem intimidating.

Focus on the fact that you must have passed your transfer viva to have got to the final viva. You must have. It might have been hard, but you did it. You did it because you had whatever you needed to pass.

And you’ll have that for the final viva too.

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