Viva advice

We had two recently completed PhD students advising us PG students today. They shared their experiences of their vivas.

One experience sounded quite difficult and upsetting, but now that she has come to terms with it, it sounds like a positive experience. In the viva, you would expect questions to be asked on:

• background
• theory
• method
• results

and probably asked in order. So when she found the examiner asking her questions on the literature, she expected eventually to move on to the method. But the examiner persisted asking her about articles that she hadn't read, asking her questions that she couldn't answer, and then eventually moved rapidly through the other sections. The examiners were happy with the other sections, less so with the literature. She passed with major corrections and a year to do them. The positive experience is that the examiner is now so supportive, providing a list of the corrections and the literature to embroider into the thesis; it's like having another supervisor. The student made the corrections within three months, going through the list ticking them off.

Our other new PhD student also passed. He had minor corrections, perhaps partly to do with English not being his first language. Fellow students in second and third year have been reading his work to help him with these corrections.

Their advice included:

• speak slowly, distinctly and formally
• offer short general statements
• constantly refer to the literature
• connect a point made in a question to some debate in the literature
• read viva chapter in "Doing Post Graduate Research"
  
• take a notepad in with you in case you want to write a question down
• put post-its at the start of each chapter so you can find it quickly
• draw bubble diagrams of the main themes
  
• have a mock viva
• have your say in the selection of examiners.

You can have some say in selecting your examiner. One of ours found her examiner when in her first year she attended a doctoral colloquium where the examiner was leading. She came back and discussed it with her supervisors. They usually know something about possible supervisors, may be friends with them, but can also warn the student off unsuitable supervisors. Some might not know the subject; others might have a different philosophy on the method you've chosen, or may be too intent on making a name for themselves (early researchers perhaps) to be sympathetic examiners.