You Are Here

Tag: viva stories

Nathan

Why Expectations Matter

Daily Post

Expectations give your viva a sense of shape.

Expectations help you understand the pattern even if you know your viva will be unique.

Regulations and stories help you understand the process (in some cases in a lot of detail).

Every viva will be one of a kind – but no upcoming viva needs to be a complete unknown to a candidate.

And with a sense of what to expect you can measure how ready you feel for your viva.

 

PS: I’ll be exploring viva expectations a lot at my Viva Survivor session four weeks from today! Check out my live 3-hour webinar on Wednesday 25th March 2026 for more details of what I’ll cover: viva prep, examiners and a lot more. Attendees 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

Unexpectations

Daily Post

There is a lot that you can expect from your viva.

If you explore regulations and viva stories you can get a good sense of what they are like. Regulations give a foundation of the process and what examiners do. Viva stories describe the pattern of experiences that candidates have.

They give a feel for vivas. As a result, you can build expectations you can work towards.

 

There is also a lot that you can’t expect from your viva.

Stories might showthe range of experiences but you can’t expect a particular viva length or a definite opening question. You can be confident of the work you’ve invested but you can’t expect your examiners to agree with you about every detail of your research.

You can know about vivas but still expect that there will be some unknowns – aspects of your viva that you cannot know until you get there.

You can expect a lot but must also expect the unexpected.

Nathan

Other Vivas

Daily Post

Every viva is unique. All vivas follow patterns.

Some vivas follow patterns more closely than others.

A friend’s viva experience can give you a hint of what to expect but not the whole story.

Reading about someone’s feelings might help you to process your own, but only in part.

Listening to a podcast can give you some great tips but you still won’t know what you’ll be asked until you’re there with your examiners.

 

Knowing about other vivas is helpful.

Stories, experiences and regulations can feed into the pattern of expectations to help you prepare.

As ready as you can be, you won’t know the whole story until you have your viva.

 

PS: for more thoughts on how to resolve the tension between viva expectations and the fact that every viva is unique please take a look at The Expectations Issue of Viva Survivors Select, my latest curated collection of Viva Survivors posts and new viva help.

Nathan

Unrecorded

Daily Post

The vast majority of viva experiences are unrecorded.

Candidates don’t typically write an account of it or give an interview afterwards. Until fairly recently vivas were occasionally audio-recorded for quality assurance but it wasn’t common at all to record vivas beyond examiners’ paperwork and notes.

During and after the surge to video vivas during 2020 and 2021, the opportunity for recording vivas has grown massively. It’s now possible to record many vivas quite easily with a few software options. My suspicion, based on hunch and anecdotes, is that vivas still are not typically recorded in this way though.

I can see that it might be helpful for some candidates if they were. I am confident that no major objections would be made if a candidate wanted to make a recording to review the viva discussion afterwards.

(I can’t imagine it would be something the candidate would watch a lot though!)

 

It would be helpful if PhD candidates reflected and recorded their experiences after the viva though. It could help someone else to hear or read a short account of what happened at your viva, what you thought and what that might mean.

It might also be a good memento of the day: a reminder when you encounter future challenges that you are very capable of rising to big things.

 

PS: one thing that will be recorded in the near future is my Viva Survivor live webinar on Thursday 5th December 2024! I’d love everyone to be there for the full three hours, but if you have to arrive a little after the start or dash away before the end there will be a four-week catch-up recording you can stream. More details here, do check it out.

Nathan

Realistic

Daily Post, Sabbatical

You can’t know exactly what will happen at your viva before you have it.

But you can know about the many vivas of your friends and colleagues. Use stories of vivas in the past to help get ready for yours in the future.

From these stories you can see that vivas range in length. They’re fairly structured conversations. You can expect challenging questions. You can also know who your examiners are and what they do. You can’t know what questions they will ask, but you can get a sense of what they might want.

Altogether you can have a good idea of what your viva will be like. You can build up a realistic set of expectations rather than worry about the unknown aspects.

 

Viva Survivors Summer Sabbatical: I’m taking July, August and September off from new writing to concentrate on other creative projects, so will be sharing a post from the archives every day throughout those months. Today’s post was originally published on January 8th 2022.

Nathan

Snapshots

Daily Post

Remember that if you ask someone about their viva you are going to get a picture of what happened, and not the event itself. Not all of the details will be clear and perhaps some of the things you really want to know will not be present in their story.

It’s like looking at someone else’s holiday photos. Holiday snapshots show things someone else noticed or were interested in. At first, talking about it might only give surface impressions, the short version of what happened.

Every viva story is a snapshot of an experience. A viva story doesn’t reveal everything and without context could even be confusing.  Ask about what you need to know. And ask the right people! It makes more sense to ask a few people from your own department about their viva than trawl the internet for lots of stories.

Figure out what you need to know to have more certainty for your viva and your preparations.

Nathan

The Viva Needs More Understanding

Daily Post

Candidates need to know more about examiners: how they prepare, what’s involved, what they’re asking, what they might ask and do and why.

Examiners need to know more about candidates and the PhD journey in the 2020s: they need to understand the particular thesis they’re looking at, the general experience of PGRs, the impact of COVID and more.

Supervisors need to understand the viva situation: they need to have a good handle on expectations, what helps in preparation, they have to grasp their candidates’ situations and advise them well.

And then there are researcher-developers, policy-makers, regulation-writers, awesome administrators and sensational support staff.

The viva needs more understanding. Or perhaps it is better to say that if everyone involved knew more about it then the viva, how it happens, how it’s prepared for and how it’s talked about could be better for everyone involved.

 

What can you do to improve your understanding about the viva before you have yours? Who could you ask? What do you need to know? And when you’ve been through the process, who could you share your experience with to help others with their understanding?

Nathan

Viva Varieties

Daily Post

When you hear lots of different stories about the viva it’s natural to group them together.

Short vivas. Long vivas.

Tough vivas. Easy vivas.

A presentation to start or an opening question to get things going.

Lots of questions. Hardly any.

Lots of corrections. No corrections.

Two examiners, a chair, a supervisor, a third examiner.

Expected questions and unexpected remarks.

Previously found typos and unknown errors.

And there’s more. There’s a huge range of viva experiences. Some are much more common than others. Many aspects of what “variety” your viva will be won’t be clear until you have yours.

You can’t prepare for everything, but you can be prepared. You can know the goals and expectations of your examiners, you can know what you need to demonstrate in your viva and then rise to meet that.

Long or short, easy or tough, whoever is in attendance, you can succeed.

Nathan

My Atypical Viva

Daily Post

Later this year I’ll “celebrate” fifteen years since I had my viva, and remembering that makes me realise one more time just how different my viva was to everything I’ve heard since about vivas.

Before I had my viva I was quite ignorant about the process. It didn’t occur to me until a few years afterwards that my viva was a bit odd:

  • My viva was in a quiet seminar room at the end of a corridor, but it was a room big enough for thirty.
  • I had been asked to prepare a presentation, not very common but an established viva practice. However, within two minutes of starting one of my examiners asked a question, which started the discussion. This was my viva: lots of questions, weaving occasionally back to my presentation.
  • My viva was four hours with a short break, which is quite long but manageable…
  • …but I was stood at the front of the room for the duration, near the projector and blackboard. My examiners were sat as if they were in the front row of a lecture. There was no chair at their table for me and I was never invited to sit down at any point.

On that last point I have, so far, found myself to be unique in my viva experience.

And despite all of that:

  • My viva followed the flow of the information in my thesis, like most do.
  • I had two examiners, like most vivas and they were clearly very prepared, as was I.
  • They asked lots of questions and treated me and my work with respect, even when they had criticisms.
  • I received minor corrections, like the majority of PhD candidates in the UK.
  • It felt like it was all over much more quickly than it actually was, time just flew by!

Every viva is unique. Some are more different than others! But all vivas follow key expectations and regulations. Read the rules, listen to stories and build up a good general picture that you can prepare for.

Nathan

Realistic

Daily Post

You can’t know exactly what will happen at your viva before you have it.

But you can know about the many vivas of your friends and colleagues. Use stories of vivas in the past to help get ready for yours in the future.

From these stories you can see that vivas range in length. They’re fairly structured conversations. You can expect challenging questions. You can also know who your examiners are and what they do. You can’t know what questions they will ask, but you can get a sense of what they might want.

Altogether you can have a good idea of what your viva will be like. You can build up a realistic set of expectations rather than worry about the unknown aspects.

1 2