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Nathan

Being SMART About Examiners

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Your examiners are an important part of your viva. Spend some of your viva preparation time exploring who they are and what they do. Check their recent publications to get a sense of their research but you don’t need to know everything. Setting a SMART objective to have a clear goal for your efforts is helpful so you don’t stress about needing to do more and more.

  • Specific: What are you trying to learn? What sources will you consider?
  • Measurable: How much work are you going to do? How will you know when you’re done?
  • Advantages: What will you gain by doing this? How are you hoping to feel?
  • Realistic: How many papers are you aiming to read? What makes you think that is enough?
  • Time-bound: What is your deadline? How far in advance of your viva would it be useful to have this task completed?

Just a little planning can make a tricky task manageable. Decide in advance how much prep is enough.

Nathan

Confidence Tests

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Confidence takes time and experimentation. There isn’t a set process. Rather than press a button to start an engine, we have to think of it as turning dials and pulling levers on a great, glorious machine. Try something, then check gauges to see the responses.

This is true generally in terms of building or priming confidence, and works too for building confidence for the viva.

  • Read your thesis in preparation. How do you feel now?
  • Select some clothes for the viva. What might help you feel your best?
  • Learn about your examiners. How does that help you feel?
  • Find two songs that get you feeling great. Which one works best?
  • Reflect on your past successes. Which ones stand out and help most?

You can’t flip a switch to turn on your confidence. You can try lots of things to find it though. Look for the things that help you be at your best, and shine a light on your PhD to help you see the reasons you will pass the viva.

Nathan

7 Things Not To Do During Viva Prep

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There are lots of things you could do. Here are seven things I think it’s best to avoid.

  1. Don’t look for typos obsessively.
  2. Don’t read your thesis passively.
  3. Don’t read the entire publication history for your examiners.
  4. Don’t treat your preparation like a chore.
  5. Don’t avoid prep that makes you nervous.
  6. Don’t do something just because someone told you it worked for them.
  7. Don’t create model answers for every question you can think of.

Some people say “don’t worry.”

I won’t. I don’t think it helps to worry, but it doesn’t help to get directed to not worry.

However, it is possible to distract yourself from worry by working towards being ready. And if you reflect on the negatives expressed above, you can find the positive actions you can take towards getting prepared.

Nathan

Raid The Stationery Cupboard

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There’s a lot you can do with only a few resources to prepare for your viva.

  • Pens and pencils can be used to add layers of information to your thesis. Underline typos consistently in one colour to make them easier to parse afterwards. Use pencil to add short notes in the margins.
  • Post-it Notes are great for marking out the starts of chapters and other important places. Longer notes that would be cramped in a margin can look great on a big Post-it; you can move them as needed afterwards too.
  • Use highlighters to selectively grab your attention. Chapter or section headings, important references or quotes – whatever you want to be able to see at a glance.
  • Get a small notebook to use as a viva preparation journal. Capture reflections, prompts, provocations, interesting questions.

There aren’t a lot of resources needed for viva preparation. Perhaps raid your department’s stationery cupboard before you take a trip to the local stationery shop!

Nathan

The Details

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You probably can’t commit your thesis to memory, getting every fine detail stored away somewhere.

But you could make lists of key places in your thesis where you can find useful information. You could make a couple of summary card prompts. You can highlight important sections with Post-it Notes. You could create a little index card with page numbers and helpful hints. You can do a lot to make your thesis clearer.

You don’t need to remember everything for the sake of the viva. Doing what you can to help your memory of the details will help your confidence.

Nathan

8 Things You Need To Know About The Viva

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I ask people at the start of Viva Survivor sessions what they need to know about the viva. I ask if they have gaps of knowledge, worries about what might happen or vague hypotheticals.

I’m happy to answer anything and everything that candidates want to talk about. Recently, a participant in a session turned the question around on me: what did I think people needed to know?

It’s a good question. Here’s my answer:

  1. The vast majority of candidates pass the viva. This doesn’t “just happen”…
  2. …candidates pass the viva because of what they’ve done, what they know and what they can do. Perfection is not the goal or expectation. Candidates must necessarily be really good at what they do to get to submission and the viva.
  3. Examiners will be prepared, and that’s a good thing. They’ve read your thesis, made notes and thought a lot about questions; that’s far better than the alternative!
  4. Examiners may have challenging questions, but they ask them with respect for you and your work. They’re not there to interrogate or tear work apart. Questions can be challenging, but that’s due to the nature and standard of the research involved.
  5. There are broad expectations for what the viva is like. These aren’t secret.
  6. Most candidates get some form of corrections. You probably will too. Examiners recommend them to help make the best possible thesis submission.
  7. The viva can be prepared for. You can’t anticipate and have model answers for every question, but by preparing well you can be ready and confident to answer any question that comes up.
  8. The viva might be the final test, but it’s not the only test. You’ve invested a lot of time and energy into your PhD: the viva is not the only milestone you’ve passed. You’ve consistently applied yourself and achieved. The viva is one more time you have to meet the standard.

And that’s what I think candidates need to know about the viva.

Nathan

Waiting

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There isn’t a perfect time to start preparing for the viva. You don’t really need to start until after you’ve submitted; apart from that you have to think sensibly about your priorities. How you can add this work to your other commitments?

If you think you can manage all the things you need to do in two weeks, that’s fine. Need a month to space things out? No problem.

But… If you’re not sure, if you’re just leaving things for a while… If you’re waiting for the right time… What are you waiting for?

What’s going to be different? What will make next week better than now?

There’s no danger you might be overprepared if you do something now rather than save it for later.

Far better not to wait, start well, than to leave it and rush.

Nathan

All Of The Above?

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There’s a lot of everything.

  • There’s hundreds of references in your thesis. You don’t need to check all of them before the viva.
  • Your examiners have probably published a lot. You don’t need to read everything of theirs.
  • You have pages and pages of important ideas in your thesis. You don’t need to memorise them all.
  • There are lots of questions you might be asked in the viva. You can’t rehearse and prepare for them all.
  • There are many ways you can explore your thesis and annotate it before you meet your examiners. You can’t follow up every idea.

But you have to do something.

You have to take some time. You have to think about what’s missing. You have to explore for yourself what you need to do. You have to take the time, because no-one else can. You might need to be a little brave in some cases, because once you know you need to do something then you need to do it or you’ll only feel worried.

But you can do it. If you got this far through your PhD, you can do this.

Finally, there are over 750 posts on this blog. You don’t need to have read them all to be ready for your viva – but there’s a lot that will help!

Nathan

Three Favourite Summaries

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I like thinking about and developing ideas to get people creating summaries of their thesis.

An essential part of the viva prep process is to think about your research, and it’s useful to take a step back and try to think differently. Rather than let that thinking be abstract and drift away, it makes sense to capture it, both to help clarify what you think and to build a resource.

While I’ve been tinkering away on lots of ideas for a long time, when I deliver a Viva Survivor session, there are three in particular I recommend to candidates:

  1. “What’s Important?” – a simple, powerful question, framed on a single sheet of paper for each chapter. “What’s important?” can prompt a lot of thoughts in a lot of different ways, and restricting the answer to one side of paper for a chapter forces you to be thoughtful and not just wander off.
  2. Edited Bibliography – a prompt to explore the most useful references that support your thesis. Your thesis bibliography might stretch to hundreds and hundreds of articles, but what’s at the core of that? What would help a reader more than anything? What helps your research more than anything? What are the twenty or thirty most useful references? That’s your edited bibliography.
  3. A VIVA Summary – using four prompts to analyse a chapter and really direct your thoughts about your thesis. What’s Valuable to others in this chapter? What is Interesting to you? What do you find Vague or unclear? What questions might you like to Ask your examiners? These four prompts help to explore not just the ideas in your thesis, but how you express them, how you made them real and a lot more.

These are my favourites, and they can help a lot. If you try them, let me know how well they work for you!

Nathan

The Most Effective Viva Prep Strategy

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Or MEVPS, for short.

There isn’t one, not one that works for everyone. Everyone is different, every candidate has a unique thesis, every candidate has a unique set of circumstances and a unique situation when they get to preparation time for the viva. So to say, “Here: the MEVPS is X, Y and Z and you’ll be fine!” would a terrible lie. I don’t have a MEVPS to offer.

But I do have a strategy for building a useful, unique approach for you:

  1. Reflect on the particular gaps you have in your knowledge or confidence for the viva.
  2. List some things you could do to fill those gaps, estimating generously how much time they might take.
  3. Reflect on how busy you are generally, then see how the tasks you need to do can fit in with your life.
  4. Make a simple plan, pick a start date and be kind to yourself with what you will do on that first day.
  5. Start, and follow through on the plan.

The details will be different for everyone, but everyone can figure out a route to being prepared by following the SFSPFCAPVPP.

(that’s Simple Five Step Process For Creating A Personal Viva Prep Plan!)

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