Preparing for the viva
A doctoral student – Fenia – from the Counselling area in our School whose work and thinking about doing research multilingually and whose crosscultural topic have brought her into my space to some extent – will have her viva on the 14th July.
Does anyone have advice and /or links to sites of viva Qs/advice etc that Fenia might find useful? These ideas will, I hope, become of use to others in this community in coming weeks, months and years.
Carol, Viv, WooJoo, Jane – any advice?
Anyone interested in Fenia’s reflections on her doctoral experience can read about them here
Good news!! Fenia had her viva yesterday and writes:
Dear Richard
Just to let u know that I passed my viva! and the result is awesome (just a few typos and some references to sort out). I found it a challenging but fair experience – I actually enjoyed the debate so much!
F
hello, thank you for the input. I find myself feeling calm about the viva as i think that i have given all i could to it and i have been transparent in my writing about the process…and yes, i hope to enjoy it too, i see it as an opportunity to debate about my work with respectful academics. All well…
Good luck Fenia. Someone here in Bristol advised me to enjoy the viva 🙂 I know this sounds unrealistic in that it is an exam and a high stakes one at that but in fact you are the expert on your work and it is your chance to share your workings with the examiners. Not sure if this is helpful?
Mock-viva might help:)
My supervisor asked me questions and I tried to answer the questions as if I am in a real viva. The questions that I prepared were based on objectives of my research, research questions and some weakness of my research.
Mock-viva helped me to calm down myself and be confident about my research. I understand that viva makes you really nervous but you have to think you are the expert in your area and be confident about it:)
I don’t know whether my response was helpful for Fenia but good luck on your viva!