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Tag: viva preparation

Nathan

Viva Prep Party!

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Imagine that viva prep is an amazing party!

  • Look at your diary and think about when you’ll host it.
  • Who do you invite?
  • Do you need to invite more people so that you can be sure of enough help?
  • What supplies do you need to make sure that it goes well?
  • It’s a really long party probably, so what will happen when?
  • What do you need to do in advance to help it along?
  • And how will you maintain your own energy throughout?

Of course, viva prep is not a party but similar questions can help you organise, get help and do the work well.

That way you’re ready for the celebrations after your viva!

Nathan

Getting Ready & Being Ready

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The process and the goal.

Getting ready means reading your thesis, asking questions, checking things, making notes and building confidence. Being ready means feeling certain that your viva will be successful.

Before you sit down to get ready, think ahead to what you want to feel when you are ready. What does being ready mean for you? What would you have done? What would convince you that you’re ready for your viva?

When you have a sense of what it would mean for you to be ready for your viva, you can plan and do your preparations much more easily.

Nathan

3 Kinds Of Viva Prep

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Rushed: done in a hurry in the days leading up to the viva.

Worried: done while wondering whether or not the right things are being done.

Overinvested: a LOT done, far more than needed, either through concern something will be missed or perfectionism.

Thankfully, these kinds of viva prep aren’t the only options!

You can do the combined opposite of all of these to get ready. Plan ahead so there’s no rush. Find out what you really need to do so you have no worries and use your time well. Let’s define this fourth kind of prep as…

Relaxed: done over a suitable timescale for the candidate, with clear activities and goals that lead to being ready.

Nathan

The Last Review

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What will you look for when it’s the last time to look over your thesis before your viva?

  • The sections and sentences you’ve highlighted?
  • The red pen that shows the typos and changes you want to make?
  • The paragraphs that make you feel proud of what you’ve done?
  • The margins of notes you think you need?
  • Or the final pages that bring your research to a conclusion?

Or something else entirely? You have to decide where you need to give your attention. It’s probably best to steer towards the good stuff rather than remind yourself of typos. They’re there, you’ve acknowledged them, you know what you need to do.

Save your attention for what really matters.

Nathan

Extreme Prep!

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Good advice about viva prep doesn’t include the following:

  • Read your thesis for twelve hours a day, every day!
  • Make notes on everything you can think of!!
  • Re-read every reference in your bibliography!!!
  • Have three mock vivas! Do one while balanced on a unicycle!!!

Of course, these are a little silly- but I have heard from candidates who push themselves way too hard or believe they’ll need to so they’ll be ready.

You don’t need to be perfect. You don’t need to memorise everything.

Keep it simple. Read your thesis, annotate it, check a few things out like regulations and key papers, and do make sure you rehearse a little for talking to your examiners.

Stay away from the extremes when it comes to viva prep.

Nathan

Perspective, Not Perfection

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As part of your viva preparations, make sure you have researched your examiners’ most recent publications. For both external and internal, take a look at their last two or three papers. Get a sense of their interests, the methods they use and the questions they have been considering.

Compare that with what you’ve done. Look for commonalities and differences, and build an idea of what that means for you, your work and your viva. Are there questions you might anticipate? Are there topics in your thesis that you might have to explain to them because they might be outside of their knowledge base?

Read your examiners’ recent papers to gain perspective. You don’t need to become perfectly aware of everything they have ever done or everything they currently do.

A little work will help.

Nathan

Three Easy Wins

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I start most working days with “three easy wins” for my productivity: before I get stuck into the harder stuff and deeper thinking I do three things that help me feel like I’m already making progress.

A walk is often top of my list. I’ll check accounts and spreadsheets to see if I need to do anything. And I’ll sort out newsletters and spam that have arrived overnight.

Nothing strenuous: easy or simple tasks that help clear my head, free up thinking space or help me to move on to tougher work.

What could you do to give yourself three easy wins when you sit down to prepare for your viva? Here are some ideas!

  1. Remember and write down one success from your PhD research.
  2. Write “You can do this!” at the top of page 1 of your thesis.
  3. Google the regulations for vivas at your university.
  4. Ask a friend to meet you for coffee and talk.
  5. Find a good page in your thesis and stick a bookmark in.
  6. Decide on one thing you will do to celebrate your success.
  7. Note down one question you think you’ll get in the viva.
  8. Take two minutes to write out a short summary of one result in your thesis.
  9. Attach sticky notes to the start of each chapter in your thesis.
  10. Underline what you wrote for suggestion 2!!

There are big tasks that you can do to help you get ready for your viva. There are lots of little things you can do too that will add to how you feel. Start small each time and do things that build you up for your viva.

 

PS: Number 11 on the list could be “Check out and back 101 Steps To A Great Viva on Kickstarter!“

Nathan

Prep Is A Workout

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Viva prep is a series of tasks and activities that help you towards being ready for the specific challenge of your viva. From that perspective, I think it’s fair to think of it as a workout: you’re exercising specific mental muscles, getting in a good academic condition for the work you’ll do on the day responding to your examiners.

Viva prep is building on foundations you’ve created through your life and PhD journey; like many workout programmes it requires a little preparation itself, a little planning so that you space the work out.

(no pun intended)

Like a workout though, you have to actually do the work. You have to read your thesis, make notes and annotations, rehearse for being in the viva and more. And like a workout that work is personal to every candidate: every candidate has a unique set of needs they have to satisfy to reach the ready state they want, even if there are general principles that will help every candidate as they work towards being ready.

So: what are your needs? How are you going to workout in preparation for your viva?

Nathan

Figuring Out Fears

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It’s not irrational to be nervous about your viva or concerned for what might happen. The outcome matters, it’s important, and naturally anyone who faced a viva in their near future could feel a little nervous.

If you’re anxious, worried or afraid though, you have a problem that needs to be addressed. Shying away or hoping you just feel better soon won’t help. You need to do something.

Ask yourself three questions, in sequence:

  • Why do you feel the way you do?
  • How might you address the problem?
  • What will you do?

Start with why. Unpick what is really causing the problem for you. Perhaps you’ve found something in your thesis and you know it will need to be discussed. Maybe you don’t know something about the viva process and that gap of knowledge is causing worry. Once you know why you feel the way you do you can start to make a change.

Ask yourself how you might address the issue. There will be a way to move forward; there will probably be lots of things you could do. Ask for help. Ask for advice. At the viva you have to respond to questions by yourself but before then there are lots of people who can provide support.

Decide what you will do. You can get help but you have to act. If there’s a problem, you have to take steps to get past it. You’re the only one who can.

It’s not wrong to be nervous and it’s possible you might face problems.

But you can figure them out, move past them and have a good viva.

Nathan

One Weird Trick

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I can’t believe I’ve never shared this before!

It’s this one weird trick that helps with the viva!!

One thing that universities, examiners and PhD graduates don’t want you to know!!!

Whatever discipline you are in, however long you have to go before your viva and whatever you feel about your viva, this one weird trick will help!!!!

Are you ready?

Do the work.

That’s it, the one weird trick that helps with the viva: do the work.

Take your time, but do the work. Feel frustrated, but do the work. Procrastinate, but take the time to do the work.

Have questions? Do the work to find out the answers. Unsure about something? Do the work to ask someone who can give you certainty. Feel unprepared for your viva? Do the work to feel ready.

And sometimes it’s really hard! Sometimes it is hard to get up and do the work you need to do because you’re tired, or you’re nervous or you just don’t know what you want or where you’re going.

There are even times where you know you need to do something but you don’t what that something is!

Then you have to do the work to figure it out.

 

Ask for help. Plan your prep. Rehearse for your viva. Explore expectations. Maybe finish your thesis first!

But do the work.

Do the work because it’s the one weird trick that really will help with everything.

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