Daily viva help for PhDs
Where peers are your friends, colleagues, acquaintances and whatever other titles you can think of!
Ask about their vivas. Ask about their experiences. Ask what they know about the viva.
Ask them what they did to get ready and if they have any advice (but only if they will offer suggestions and not instructions).
Ask them to help you if it’s appropriate.
Seek help now. Offer help later.
Or, a handy guide to the scope and scale of various viva preparation activities!
Small Tasks
Medium Tasks
Large Tasks
There’s lots you could do to get ready. You don’t need to do everything, but everything you do will help.
You have an opportunity during viva prep to make your thesis as useful as possible for you. Thesis annotation doesn’t just mean writing notes in the margins. Perhaps using colour could help, for example:
These suggestions are just to start your thinking. There’s a lot more you could do when you consider the specifics of your thesis and the information in there.
How could you use a little colour to help your viva prep?
Viva preparation is a big part of getting ready. It takes time for a candidate to make sure their thesis is ready and that they feel prepared to sit down and talk with their examiners. Lots of practical tasks and a little planning can make a big difference.
Building up confidence is an important task too. In some ways it’s even more important than the practical tasks that go into prep. It’s not enough to sit down and read your thesis or have a mock viva: you have to feel that you are ready. You have to find your confidence by reflecting on your journey.
While viva prep and confidence building are essential, exploring them often means that we overlook the hardest part of getting ready for the viva – and the one that every candidate has completed.
The hardest part is doing the work of a PhD candidate for years. The hardest part is laying the foundations for study, exploration and development. The hardest part of getting ready for the viva is the thousands of hours of work, invested over hundreds and hundreds of days when you show up.
You need to spend a few weeks getting ready, preparing your thesis and yourself, and reflecting on why you are good enough to succeed in the viva. Don’t forget that the hardest part of your journey to the viva and to success is already behind you.
Looking in a mirror shows things reversed. Looking in a spoon shows things distorted. And reflecting on research doesn’t automatically reveal everything we want or need.
With all of that in mind, perhaps the best thing you can do when when reflecting on your research for viva preparation is to reflect a lot.
Ask lots of questions. Create lots of small summaries. Find many different ways to look at what you’ve done, how you did it, why you did it and what happened.
A reflection is never perfect, but by exploring different perspectives you will find more than if you just looked back one time on one aspect.
In a few months it will be five years since I first published 7776 Mini-Vivas – a little game to play and get practice for the kinds of discussion you might face in the viva. I’m going to do something special to mark five years since I made it, but I don’t know what yet!
Since making 7776 Mini-Vivas I’ve made a small printed version, adapted it in several ways and occasionally shared other posts here with particular question sets. You can use it as a reflection tool, as conversation practice and as a means to rehearse key questions or ideas.
Take a look at 7776 Mini-Vivas if you haven’t already; explore the resource and think about how you could use it to get ready for your viva. I’ve been thinking about ideas for variants on the concept a lot lately. If you’re looking for more fun ways to use it, here are six:
How else could you use the idea of having a mini-viva or two to help you get ready?
If you feel worried about any aspect of your viva, ask yourself why first. For example:
“I feel worried about the discussion…”
Why?
“I’m worried I might forget something important…”
When you know what’s behind a worry you can start to do something about. You could reflect and think of possible steps to take. Continuing the example, possible next steps could be:
These are all possible steps to help. Individually they might not be solutions to the problem, but they could move someone closer to feeling better about the worry. When you have possible steps, you then have to do something.
When faced with a worry about the viva, follow three steps:
Why is this a worry? How could I do something? What will I do?
There are three things your examiners have to do in your viva:
They have to do this. There’s a lot to talk about and a lot that could be brought up through the discussion, but as a starting point, consider how you would respond to these three questions:
Each question corresponds to a point from above; there’s more to ask, more to say and these are just starting points. But what would you say?
I need to remove distractions so that I can focus on my writing and projects.
I have to turn my email software off. Same for social media. I make sure I have drinks on my desk so I can’t use the excuse of getting up to avoid work. I wear noise-cancelling headphones and only listen to music without speech or singing.
And I always sit down with a plan so that I’m not distracted by debating with myself about “the best thing to write”!
When you focus on viva preparation think about the situation where you’ll be doing the work. What can you do to remove distractions? What can you do to create peace, quiet and calm for yourself?
Perhaps you need to tell people to leave you alone or give you space. Maybe you need to put headphones on or shut a door. Gather your resources first so that you aren’t tempted to get up and get more things.
And come to your preparations with a plan. Don’t decide what you’ll do in the moment, decide in advance to get rid of distractions.
What are the best parts of your work?
What are you most proud of?
What was a challenge that you overcame?
And what do you like to share with others about your research?
The viva is not a platform for you to simply proclaim the greatness of your research and writing, but it helps to go there with ideas of what really matters. Reflecting on your research before the viva helps to boost your confidence for talking about it with your examiners.
Your examiners don’t expect you to have all the answers. They don’t want you to read from a script or parrot sentences you’ve learned. They want to hear your most considered thoughts.
Take a little time in your viva preparations to consider what your work means and what you can share about it. What do you want to emphasise to your examiners? What matters?