Categories
viva

Common Questions About The Viva: Dress Code

Is there a dress code for the viva?

Whenever I deliver a workshop on viva preparation, I ask “What do you want to know about the viva?” 100% of the time I get asked about the lengths of vivas, but as I answered that question last week, I thought that I would ask the question I get asked at 99% of workshops: is there a dress code for the viva?

In a few institutions, there is a standard of academic attire that is required (I believe Oxford and Cambridge often asks for candidates to wear academic black dress robes); be sure to check if there are any requirements at your institution. Guidelines might be given, but more often it is the candidate’s choice to decide what they want to wear. I know people who have worn business casual to their viva, and I know people who have worn a t-shirt and ripped jeans. I also know people who have stressed over what is “the best” or “the right” thing to wear.

Categories
review

Nathan Reads: Gamestorming

Books Books Books

There are some great, helpful books on PhD topics (and vivas too, including my own short ebook on viva preparation, Fail Your Viva!) and about once a month I’ll post a review of a book which I’ve found really valuable, and which I think could be really valuable to PGRs in general.

The first up is “Gamestorming” by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo. This is a book that I have found invaluable in the kind of work that I do, and I think that it is something which can really help people in lots of ways.

Using a Heuristic Ideation Technique, which I saw first in Gamestorming.
Using a Heuristic Ideation Technique, which I saw first in Gamestorming. Picture taken at a workshop on blogging I delivered several years ago.
Categories
creative thinking

Creative Thinking Tuesday, 14th October 2014

What Inspires You?

Starry Night, photo by me
The Starry Night, photo by me

On my honeymoon, my wife and I were fortunate enough to visit MOMA and have a good morning of wandering around. It began with The Starry Night, which to my humble untrained eye is the most amazing piece of art ever. Whenever I look at it I feel refreshed, alive with possibilities: it gets my brain turning over, and gets me wondering… What if…?

There are lots of creative thinking processes and tools to aid idea generation (see my post on DRC, for example), but if these are the tools for the job, it’s still important to have raw materials. Inspiration – something that makes you go “Hmmmmmm…” – can come from lots of places. Where do you get your inspiration from? It comes from somewhere, so where is it?

Categories
news

Catch Up, 13th October 2014

Every two weeks or so, on a Monday, I write a recap of what I’ve been posting about – just in case you missed anything, after all, you’re busy, it’s not all about me! – and also share a couple of links to articles or things that I’ve found interesting recently.

On this blog

I shared some ideas about capturing ideas, and then a couple of posts each with ten questions: first, for people who were starting a PhD and the second for people who were starting another year of their PhD. The second seemed to interest folk a lot, I was tweeted left, right and centre and had a few hundred people come and read it! If you shared it, thank you, and if you read it I hope it helped.

Last week was all about the research I’ve been working on, looking into the viva experience of PhD graduates in the UK. This was a series of five posts, and I am very happy that they have been shared and read as widely as they have already. I’m thinking hard about the next step for this research – I have a couple of ideas, and if you have any thoughts please get in touch!

Anyway, enough about this blog – what other treats have I seen?

Categories
series viva

Viva Experience Research, Part 5: Drawing Threads Together

So Far

On Monday I introduced the research I set in motion earlier this year, a series of seven questions I asked PhD graduates about their viva experiences. On Tuesday and Wednesday I shared the basic quantitative results that I have found through analysing the responses I received, and yesterday I shared some of the qualitative responses that people gave, and offered a few thoughts on this.

What do all of these results say?

Vivas are not as long – on the whole – as stories about vivas lead us to believe; the vast majority of candidates who pass do so with minor corrections or no corrections; it seems a greater than previously believed proportion of candidates are told at the start of their viva that they have passed – and this is especially pronounced in ASH disciplines (Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities). Far more graduates think of their viva as being positive rather than negative, although almost a quarter of the respondents associated their viva with stress.

Categories
series viva

Viva Experience Research, Part 4: What People Say

“What three words come to mind when you think of your viva?”

This question was the most challenging part of my research in to the viva to date, and also one of the most interesting. The quantitative answers that I found – explored in Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s posts – were interesting, and I think have a lot to offer people who are trying to set their expectations for the viva.

They are also a little…soul-less. Yes or No. True or False. This number or that number. Where is the feeling? Where is the emotion? The viva is not just about research, there is a real person involved. The candidate – the graduate! – is the PhD, not the research, not the thesis. If you’ve passed, what three words come to mind when you think of your viva?

Can you see any of them in the following Wordle?

A basic Wordle showing common words expressed about the viva.
A basic Wordle showing common words expressed about the viva.
Categories
viva

Viva Experience Research, Part 3: Forming An Outline

The Story So Far

In yesterday’s post I shared some results from my survey about

  • the length of vivas;
  • the percentage of graduates that get minor corrections;
  • the discovery that 20.9% of PhD graduates are told at the start of their viva that they have passed.

These results get more interesting when we take into account research disciplines of respondents.

It is difficult to form impressions of individual subject areas, because of low numbers of particular areas. I decided to group respondents based on whether the discipline could broadly be considered Science and Engineering (SCI) or Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (ASH); I used these to check for differences between viva experiences, starting with the simple areas of data that I talked about yesterday.

SCI Vivas

For SCI vivas (204 out of 302 respondents) the average viva length is 2 hours and 39 minutes; however, this doesn’t really mean all that much without some other analysis of the numbers. A closer examination shows:

  • 76% of SCI vivas were three hours or less; just over 5% were an hour or less.
  • Around 6% were more than four hours.
  • The most common viva length was still two hours (however there was a greater variety of longer vivas).
Categories
series viva

Viva Experience Research, Part 2: Some Statistics

How long is the average viva?

Top of my list of questions, I wanted to know how long vivas were. I added up all of the lengths and divided by the number of participants and arrived at 2 hours and 23 minutes.

So now we know.

Except…

That’s not very helpful is it? We need to know how that relates to the various lengths reported. Is this skewed by one person with a twelve hour viva? (thankfully no!) This average gives us a smile I think, but not much more. So let’s look closer:

Generated by Wordle, the common viva times reported in terms of minutes. Size indicates relative frequency.
Generated by Wordle, the common viva times reported in terms of minutes. Size indicates relative frequency.

This image shows times concentrated around a range from 120 to 180 minutes. In fact, in my data:

  • 82.1% of respondents reported a viva of three hours or less, and almost 50% had a viva of two hours of less.
  • Less than 5% had a viva of more than four hours.
  • The most commonly reported time was 2 hours.

This is good news – and I think does a lot to debunk urban legends that get circulated. This data was collected from respondents who had their viva between 1999 and 2014, but almost two thirds of the responses were from 2010/14; when the set is restricted to responses from this period the results hold more or less true, with only a slight increase in longer vivas.

Categories
series viva

Viva Experience Research, Part 1: Background

To Begin With

My viva was four hours long, and I was stood in front of a chalkboard for the entire duration.

Yeah: I know.

After my PhD, I started work as a skills trainer with postgraduate researchers, and I began delivering sessions on viva preparation. I could tell people about my viva, and about other vivas I had heard about, but I realised very quickly that:

  1. My viva was not typical, and while it was fine to talk about, it didn’t necessarily help people feel OK;
  2. I knew a lot about vivas anecdotally, but I didn’t know for sure what the general experience was like.

So I started the Viva Survivors Podcast – by the way, there’s a brand new episode up there today! – I wanted to share stories that would help people feel that the viva was not a terrible thing, and also see that there were things that could be done to prepare for it. By showing a variety of disciplines, postgraduate researchers would see that it was OK – and hopefully see that whatever differences individual vivas have, they also have a lot in common.

About two years later I realised that it was helping, but it wasn’t enough, not by itself.

So I asked seven questions.

Categories
Uncategorized

10 Questions For The Next Year Of Your PhD

Starting another year of your PhD?

Congratulations! I’ll bet it’s been tough so far, but you’re making progress I’m sure. As you start another year it’s a good time to take a step back and reflect. Here are ten questions to get you started.

What have you done in the last year? List all of the different things that you have accomplished, in particular things that you have done which have a direct impact on your thesis. Take some time listing these; you have probably done a lot more than you first think of.

What’s been the most difficult thing that you have achieved? Think carefully about what was really tricky and what you did to overcome it. Something like this might crop up again in the future, and you’ll know how to tackle it then.