You Are Here

Tag: viva prep

Nathan

Opposites

Daily Post

What would the opposite of good viva preparation look like? I asked this question in my first book, Fail Your Viva – which, incidentally, has pretty good reviews on Amazon – but if you want the short version, here it is:

  • Never read your thesis.
  • Never ask for help.
  • Ignore any thoughts about possible questions.
  • Don’t have any kind of practise.
  • Basically do nothing.

Going right off the deep end: burn your thesis, trash the backups, pile your desk and bookshelf contents into a box and drive to a landfill. Decide not to turn up.

So: if that’s the opposite of good viva prep, what are you going to do?

Nathan

A Viva Alphabet

Daily Post

There’s lots and lots to unpack about the viva. Questions, answers, preparation, people, the PhD process, research, confidence and so much more! We can’t cover everything in one post, but what can we do…? How about the following: aspects of the viva and questions that could be helpful.

  • A is for Advice: take advice from anyone who can help. Who could give you great advice about the viva?
  • B is for Better: this is you at the end of the PhD. In what ways have you improved over the last few years?
  • C is for Confidence: it’s OK to feel nervous, but it’s right to feel good about your work. What can you do to build up your confidence?
  • D is for Defence: an alternate name for the viva. Are you ready to defend your choices?
  • E is for Examiners: they’ll be ready for the viva. What are you doing to get ready?
  • F is for Failure: it’s a remote possibility but a persistent thought. What can you do to push it aside?
  • G is for Good: there’s a lot of good stuff in your thesis (or you wouldn’t be where you are). What three things jump out when you think about it now?
  • H is for Help: ask for what you need. So… What do you need?
  • I is for I-Don’t-Know: it’s fine to say this in the viva. What do you feel uncertain about?
  • J is for Journey: it’s taken some time to get to where you are. How far have you come?
  • K is for Kit: every candidate needs to take their thesis, pen and paper and water. What else would be useful to you?
  • L is for Learning: you cannot get to the end of the PhD unchanged. What have you learned along the way?
  • M is for Minor: expect that you’ll have minor corrections because most people do. How will you fit them around everything else in your life that you have to do?
  • N is for Need: there’s lots of advice about what you “should” do to prepare, or “should” do or say in the viva. But what do you need to do to feel as confident as possible?
  • O is for Obstacles: there’s no chance that you finished without encountering problems. What obstacles have you overcome during your PhD?
  • P is for Preparation: success and confidence in the viva is not down to hope. What are you going to do to be prepared?
  • Q is for Questions: there are 1001+ things you could be asked in the viva. What questions have you been asked about your thesis?
  • R is for Research: this is how you got to where you are. So what have you done?
  • S is for Summaries: making summaries of your thesis is a good exercise and produces a valuable resource. What formats work for you?
  • T is for Thesis: you wrote a book! Congratulations – now what can you usefully add in annotations in preparation for the viva?
  • U is for Understanding: this is what you need from friends and family, as they might not know what the viva is about. How can you help them give this to you?
  • V is for Valuable: your thesis has to contain something of value. What do you think is valuable in your research?
  • W is for Why: the fundamental question. Why? (…did you do the research? …does it matter? …is it right?)
  • X marks the spot: some things in your thesis really are more valuable than others. When annotating how are you going to highlight them?
  • Y is for Yes: a celebratory yes!!! (what else did you think you might be saying at the end of the viva?)
  • Z is for Zzzzzzz: you could easily feel exhausted by the end of the viva. Or are you going out to celebrate? 🙂

Not the whole of the viva experience or viva preparation by any stretch, but we’ve covered a lot. What do you think? Any suggestions or substitutions?

Nathan

Help Someone

Daily Post

If your viva’s not coming up yet, or it’s in the past, find someone to help. If you know someone who has their viva soon, or someone who is finishing their PhD, ask them what they need. Don’t assume that you have all the answers or the right way to do something. Check what they need first. Then see if you can meet those needs. If you can’t, see if you can figure out what else might help.

If you don’t need help, what can you do to help someone?

Nathan

Friction

Daily Post

Google around and you’ll find lots of articles about problems with making positive changes. People don’t eat well because they don’t buy good foods. People don’t exercise because they don’t have an environment around them that supports exercise. People don’t practise with a hobby because they keep their materials shut up, and so on.

One way to get around this is to get rid of friction in the situations: actually buy healthy stuff, use books as free weights, keep your paints or guitar out where they’re in reach. Organise yourself so that you free up time to do what you want. Then you can’t rationalise your way out of doing what you need.

What are the sources of friction in your viva prep environment?

  • Is it having space, time and quiet? What can you do to address that? Who can help?
  • Do you need journal articles and certain knowledge? How are you going to get it?
  • Feel like you want the “right kind” of stationery to make notes or summaries? Where can you get what you need?

Once you get rid of the friction you can get to work. Without these kinds of friction you’ll work better too.

Nathan

Who’s Who

Daily Post

For some time I’ve suggested that researchers make an edited bibliography as part of their viva prep. If you have 200 references, what are the 20 most important? Make a list and add a few details to each of them: which chapter they’re most important to, why, and so on.

Last month at a workshop in Leeds, a participant gave me a brilliant hack of this idea. Think about the main researchers you’ve included in your bibliography, or who are big names in your field. Make a list and write a couple of sentences for each to summarise their research or opinions. Creating the list helps you to think about your field, and afterwards you have a resource to refer to as you prepare for the viva.

Nathan

Let’s Pretend

Daily Post

I am a huge fan of role-playing games. I love everything about them, from playing them to running them, investigating how they work and the kinds of play that they can produce. I have a side project as a role-playing game publisher, although my ambitions to date have been quite modest.

Anyway! One of the things I like most about them is the opportunity they give people to pretend to be someone else. You’re no longer a mild-mannered skills trainer, you’re a warrior-wizard with strange powers and a thirst for revenge! For a few hours you can step back from the real world and be someone else, somewhere else.

An element of role-playing could be really useful before the viva too. A mock viva is a kind of role-play, but there are other opportunities.

  • Imagine you’re an examiner. How do you read a thesis? What questions would come to mind?
  • Imagine you’re your supervisor. What advice would help a researcher? What could you do to help?
  • Imagine you’re one of your friends. Do you know what a viva is? What questions do you have for your friend? How can you help?
  • Imagine you’re you in the viva. How is it going? How are you feeling?
  • Imagine you’ve succeeded. How did you do it? What helped you pass the viva?

Some people act when they role-play; others just think and imagine. Try it out for yourself. Reflect on what questions or ideas come up, and see how they can help you be ready for the viva.

Nathan

9 Questions For The End Of The PhD

Daily Post

How often did you reflect during your PhD? Here are nine questions to help with some end of PhD reflection. Write or record answers for them. Your examiners are unlikely to ask some of these, but perhaps you’ll find some new insights.

  1. What’s your PhD worth?
  2. What does your PhD mean?
  3. What will you do next?
  4. What can you do now that you couldn’t do at the start?
  5. What do you know now that you didn’t know at the start?
  6. What was the greatest challenge you overcame?
  7. How did you do it?
  8. What did you leave unfinished?
  9. How do you feel now you’re at the end?

Come back to your answers after the viva. See if any of them have changed. If they have, why?

Nathan

Hierarchy of Worries

Daily Post

I record every question I get asked in workshops. The text document runs to over 15,000 words now. Over time I see trends and themes, and they help me to think about how I evolve the workshop.

In particular I see the worries of candidates collect in three groups:

  • First, people worry that there could be something wrong with their research;
  • Second, they worry that they may have made a mistake in the write-up;
  • Third, they worry that they may not be able to answer a question from their examiners.

I get lots of questions related to all these areas, and I think they’re arranged in a hierarchy. I think people are more worried about the second kind of worries than they are the first; I think they’re more worried about the third kind than the second. It makes a certain kind of sense. Research takes a long time to mature – you know everything you’ve done, everything you thought of doing, you learned from so many mistakes and successes. You know your research. Writing up took less time – however much you know about your research, there’s a chance that you’ve made a significant typo or forgotten something. You may have expressed something in a clumsy way. It’s not all that likely.

Whatever you did in your research and write-up though, you have no way of knowing exactly what your examiners will ask. There are lots of common questions, but your viva is a custom exam: you can’t predict every question or how you might respond.

Three common groups of worries, but some are more worrying than others. What do you do?

  • Worried that something is wrong with your research? Map out your methods. Check the core literature. Test your assumptions again. Try to explain it to someone who doesn’t know that much.
  • Worried that you’ve slipped up somewhere in your thesis? Get more feedback. Read it closely, line by line, no skimming. Ask a friend to proofread. Read it aloud to check that it makes sense.
  • Worried about your examiners’ questions? Practise answering questions. Have a mock viva. Use a list of common viva questions and record your answers. Get friends to ask you any and every question about your research.

Feeling worried? That’s OK. Work your way past the worries.

Nathan

Cheatsheet

Daily Post

What if you wanted to tell a friend about your research and you only had one sheet of paper? What would you put on this cheatsheet?

Would it have lots of pictures? Bullet-points? Would your abstract feature? And would it be black and white or full colour?

What would you leave out? What must you include? Do they need to know anything else in order to understand what you’re telling them?

Your friend would probably thank you, it’d be a neat insight into what you do.

If you do this, make two copies and keep one. You do valuable prep in creating the cheatsheet and then have a resource to refresh your memory later.

Nathan

Signs of Preparation

Daily Post

Bookmarks, Post Its and annotation in your thesis help you, but they’re also a signal. They tell your examiners you have prepared for the viva. You’ve read your thesis and clearly thought about it a lot since submission. At the start of the viva it says, “I’m ready.” By that point, if you’ve done the work, you are.

1 … 130 131 132 133 134 … 138