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Tag: viva prep

Nathan

Responsibility

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When something isn’t quite right in your research do you explain things with excuses or reasons?

Did you do something wrong? Did you forget something? Were you careless? Were you to blame?

Words matter. Be careful how you take responsibility for something. Consider why and how something happened, what you did at the time and what you could have done.

 

Remember that you can take responsibility but that doesn’t mean that you’re to blame.

And remember that if there is a problem in your research you can take steps before the viva to be ready to talk about it. Writing a summary, talking with your supervisor and thinking carefully can help you talk if the topic comes up.

Nathan

Broad & Narrow Questions

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You’ll find lots of broad questions about your research ahead of your viva. These are the lists of general questions that have been shared for years on websites and graduate school handouts. They’re the big questions and can be helpful in preparation and reflection as you get ready. For example:

  • Why did you explore this area?
  • How would you describe your approach?
  • What could you do differently?

These are good questions but they’re broad: they could be asked by almost anyone of almost any PhD candidate.

You’ll be asked lots of narrow questions at your viva. They relate to the topics – some of which you or your supervisor could maybe predict in advance – that your examiners could ask only of you, given your research, your experience and your thesis. For example:

  • Why did you follow the method you used in Chapter 3 over the alternate method you referenced on page 56?
  • How do you account for the gap in data that you mentioned in the second study?
  • What do you expect someone might do to develop your research further, assuming someone continued your line of study?

These kinds of questions are good but they’re narrow: they are particular only to you. They might be asked by people other than your examiners, assuming they had enough knowledge, but they could only be asked of you.

It’s likely you’ll get some broad questions at your viva. It’s certain you’ll be asked lots of narrow questions. You have to consider general broad questions in your prep to be ready for the specific narrow questions you’ll encounter in your viva.

Nathan

Finding A Way

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That’s what getting ready for your viva is: finding your way from where you are when you submit your thesis to where you need to be for your viva.

Getting ready involves viva prep – and just as every thesis, candidate and viva are unique, so too is the process of getting prepared.

There are common threads and good ideas but you’ll have to find your own way. There are practical steps you can take but you’ll also need to look back on your PhD journey to find certainty in how you got this far.

That certainty will help you find the confidence to go further. You’ll find your way.

It’s not far and you can do it.

Nathan

Share Prep Ideas

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A little request for today.

When you’ve had your viva, if something worked well in your prep then tell your friends and colleagues about it.

If you made a lot of progress because of the way you read your thesis then tell someone. If a particular annotation was helpful then share how you did it and what it meant. Or if your mock viva was good then say why.

Tell others what you did, how you planned and what helped. Don’t tell them what they should do: share ideas to give others a boost, an encouragement and an inspiration.

A little help can travel a long way in a community.

Nathan

Offering Why

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At the root of a lot of viva questions and discussions is a why.

Why did you do this? Why does it matter? Why is it helpful?

Why this and not that? Why now? Why did you choose X over Y?

It could be explicit or quiet, it could be a why you have thought about for years or a why you are finding for the first time.

As you get ready for your viva, consider all the whys you know in your preparations. Consider what happens as you rehearse and offer whys in your mock viva and other spoken preparations.

What can you do to help yourself be more ready to talk about the whys?

Nathan

Five 1-Page Summaries

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A summary is a helpful tool to use as part of viva prep. Think of one as a little project for gathering your thoughts ahead of the viva.

Summaries come in all sorts of shapes and sizes; they can bend to meet your needs and preferences. I’ve described a lot of summary ideas on the blog before – and shared a whole zine of ideas last year about how they help someone focus ahead of their viva!

Here are five 1-page summary ideas you could use to help yourself get ready for your viva.

  1. Give yourself an hour to write a list of the ten most helpful references in your bibliography. Write a sentence for each about how they helped your research.
  2. Take ten minutes to list as many keywords as you can think of that are related to your research. After a day take another ten minutes to draw lines between connected keywords and ideas.
  3. Invest thirty minutes in sketching out prep ideas. Capture any tasks or requirements for your preparation.
  4. Divide the page into three equal parts and write the following questions, one in each space: Why did I do this research? How did I do it? What is the result? Spend ten or twenty minutes writing notes and thoughts down for each question.
  5. Split the page in two. Take five minutes and on the lefthand side note down any questions, problems or concerns you have about your viva. On the righthand side, working down your list, write at least one practical step you could do to help with the item on the lefthand list.

What else could you do with a single page to help your prep?

Nathan

On Track

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What might it take to convince you that you’re on track to succeed at your PhD?

If you have questions about viva regulations and the process then information is available (from many sources) to satisfy your questions. If you need to finish your thesis or research then time, work and support will help remove those obstacles. Or if you’re done with all of that but need to get ready then there’s a wealth of ideas on good viva prep.

But if you have all of this and you need confidence – something to help you feel certain – then perhaps the only place to find that help is from yourself.

You need to look back, reflect, consider and recognise how you’ve got as far as you have. You did all of that so you can do the work needed at your viva.

You are undoubtedly on track to succeed.

 

PS: I’ll share a lot more about the viva process and confidence at my live 3-hour Viva Survivor webinar this Wednesday 25th March 2026! You’ll get four-week access to a recording of the session and follow-up materials too. Registration closes tomorrow afternoon and there’s more information at the link. Please get in touch if you have any questions or want to know more. Thanks for reading!

Nathan

What’s The Point?

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Find ways to explore and explain what your work is all about.

  • Summarise your work by writing a page or a paragraph or a sentence about each chapter. The differing scales give you different ways to think it through.
  • Take opportunities to rehearse how you describe your research. You’ll say something different to a casual friend compared with a departmental colleague.
  • Read recent and relevant publications to give more context to how your work matters and relates to your discipline.

There’s a limit to how much you can do for viva prep. The more ways you find to consider the point of your work the better you will become at responding to questions about what it means and what it does.

You don’t need to know everything or have it all worked out but you can build up experience for explaining why your work matters.

 

PS: I’ll dig into these topics a lot more at my live 3-hour Viva Survivor webinar on Wednesday 25th March 2026. You’ll get four-week access to a recording of the session and follow-up materials too. There’s more information at the link but please get in touch if you have any questions or want to know more. Thanks for reading!

Nathan

Could & Should

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You could arrange a mock viva for ten days before your viva. Or a week. Or not have one at all.

You could cover your thesis in sticky notes to make things stand out. Or underline instead. Or use a lot of highlighters.

You could plan for all your prep to be a concentrated two week burst of activity. Or you could give yourself the space to do it over a less-pressured month.

You could search around on the internet for advice on how to get ready or you could ask your friends what they did.

You could do a lot of different things to get ready for your viva. There are nearly endless possibilities for how a person could approach it.

You should make sure that you’re aware that you have options for how you get ready for your viva and then do what you need to do to meet your needs and circumstances for getting ready.

 

PS: Looking for more viva prep ideas and information? Then check out my live 3-hour Viva Survivor webinar on Wednesday 25th March 2026! You’ll also get four-week access to a recording of the session and follow-up materials too. There’s more information at the link but please get in touch if you have any questions or want to know more. Thanks for reading!

Nathan

Prep Time Is Valuable

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There’s not a lot of viva prep time compared to the rest of your PhD.

The work you do has an impact on how ready you feel for your viva.

Scarcity and impact make your prep time really valuable.

Refresh your memory, reflect on your work, rehearse for your viva and rest. The last point matters more than people tend to think.

Prep time is valuable.

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