Daily viva help for PhDs
Getting ready for the viva could take twenty hours of work spaced out over several weeks.
What’s the first task on your list?
You might have worries about the viva or preparing, but once you take your first step you’re on your way to success.
What will your first step be?
Following yesterday’s post, consider the environment that you’re going to work in to get ready for the viva. What can you do to make it as supportive as possible? Where will you go?
A little thought before you begin can make a great difference.
If you can manage it, a little routine could be useful for helping you to get ready for the viva. Viva prep will not be the first thing that goes in your diary or on your wall planner. You’ll have other commitments and responsibilities that have to come first. The prep needs to get done though. Think carefully:
Reflect a little and find times when you could get the work done. It doesn’t have to be every day, but having a routine could be useful to help you tune into the work that needs doing.
I had read my thesis. I had made notes, lots of them. Read papers by my examiners. Had six or seven hour-long conversations with my supervisor in the almost-two months leading from submission to my viva. My viva was 10am on a Monday morning, and I had a weekend free and clear to rest, relax and check anything else I needed to check.
Which I did!
And then at 9:45am on Monday, with fifteen minutes to go before the start of my viva I knocked on my supervisor’s door and said, “Hi Hugh, can I just go over the definition of a genus 2 handlebody one more time? Thanks! It’s when…”
A basic definition was perhaps not the best thing to be checking just before my viva. It was a minor point, but a worry point – something I kept checking again and again because I was sure I was misremembering something, or that something fundamental wasn’t quite sticking in my mind.
What minor points concern you? Even little things can add up to a big worry or a heap of nerves. You don’t have to start your prep by tidying away small concerns, but nor is it a good idea to finish your prep with them either.
Every year on the blog I finish by sharing a few days of my favourite posts from the year. We start 2020’s round-up with the important topic of viva preparation, and posts that cover many different aspects of getting ready for the viva.
What will you be doing to get ready for your viva? And have you read any other helpful posts on the topic on Viva Survivors, or elsewhere, that you could share with someone who needed help?
Tomorrow: the best of my long posts from this year!
That one question you know you’ll struggle with.
It might be a rational concern or an irrational worry, but either way, you can do something about it. Whatever the question is about, if you know it troubles you before the viva then you can do something to prepare for it.
If there’s a question that bothers you before the viva, then you can do something just in case it comes up.
There are valuable viva prep tasks that only need to be done once…
…there are valuable viva prep tasks that help you by doing them many times…
…there’s a limit for how much viva prep work you can really do, and a balance to find with everything you’ve done before and everything else you need to do now.
Find a balance that works for you.
It won’t make you perfect.
It won’t mean you’ll get no corrections.
It won’t mean you’ll be blank-free in the viva, or that it’s impossible you’ll be stumped.
It doesn’t come with anything like a guarantee.
But it means that, for a small investment of time, you are as ready as you can possibly be to meet your examiners and talk about your work with them. You’ve taken the time to boost yourself, not better yourself. You already know everything you need to know, you can already do everything you need to do.
This is the stretch before the race, or checking your lines just before you walk on stage.
The little extra that helps you get the viva done.
I know what makes me feel uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s possible to avoid things outside of my comfort zone; I’m self-employed so I have a certain degree of control about the kind of work I do, or the conditions I work in. Sometimes stepping out of my comfort zone is necessary though. For those situations I’ve had to figure out how I can best proceed; I’ve figured out how I can make the most of those situations even thought they’re not comfortable.
In some cases, like public speaking, I’ve even come to like something that was previously way out of my comfort zone!
It’s useful to figure out your comfort zones so you can work well, and especially useful for PGRs nearing the end of the PhD process. If the thought of the viva makes you feel uncomfortable then I think the best thing you can do is stretch yourself in advance. Stretch by presenting, by discussing, by working to build your confidence. Find more ways to practise, even small ways to get more experience and learn what you can do to make the situation better, more comfortable. Like me, you might even find a way to make the process more enjoyable for you.
Perhaps your viva will be closer to your comfort zone than you expect.
Not just prepared for your viva.
Not just OK.
And not “not too nervous…”
Ready!
How would that really feel? What would you have done to be ready, do you think? How long would it take? When would you start before your viva?
What do you need to do to get ready?