Examination & The Viva
Preparing for a Great Viva
Perhaps the first question is: When to start preparing? The obvious focus for this advice must be after thesis submission - and I'll get to that in just a moment. But there are important preparations earlier than that... One obvious one needs to be happening throughout your research, and especially during the (ongoing?) writing process. It is the idea of defensibility. Everything you research and everything you write about out it needs to be able to meet this test - can you defend it? That is not that same as being able to persuade everyone that you are right. 'Merely' that what you have written meets the required academic standards such that it is worthy of the consideration of your peers. That's defensibility, and that is the standard you'll have to meet in your viva (also known as a 'thesis defence' in some systems), so that's the standard to work to now. Another obvious thin... read more
Preparation and What To Expect
You have submitted your thesis and you are awaiting your viva. That does not mean you can relax, although after the mayhem of preparing your thesis for submission it may be worthwhile to take a small amount of time (about a week) to yourself prior to getting straight back to work. The advice I got was to go through the thesis (as submitted) and line-by-line question it. Write each question down and find out a concrete answer to all of the questions. You cannot know too much about the piece of work you have just submitted. Do not worry if you find mistakes at this stage, just be aware of why they are mistakes and how to correct them. No thesis, even when finally submitted, is perfect. Going through your thesis to find and answer these questions will not take you the entire time between submission and viva. So when you have finished, go back over the thesis again. You can even do ... read more
Choosing Your Battles
When I completed my PhD my supervisor asked me who I wanted for my external examiner. There were several options that were obvious to me but I chose Dr X (not his real name!). To put this in context, I had just spent 3 years working on a project that basically suggested that a quite well established theory was not, in fact, always correct. I had put forward a new hypothesis and that is what I would have to defend. So why did this affect my choice of examiner - simple - Dr X is a world expert in my field for whom I have great respect. He has decades of experience applying the theory I was suggesting may not be correct. He had used it to justify his own research for years and so I felt that my suggestion might be controversial to him. I admit that I regretted this decision more than once in the 6 weeks between submission and the big day. Eventually the day of the showdown came a... read more
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January 7th, 2011 09:50
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