Nathan Ryder
An ebook. Twenty-seven chapters, nearly 20,000 words, and answers to the most frequently asked questions about the PhD viva in the UK. I deliver viva preparation workshops, and over the last five years I’ve got a great understanding about the questions that distract PhD candidates. This book helps eliminate those distractions.
There are more details below, but if all you want are the purchase links, here they are!
Next Tuesday I’m releasing my second book on viva preparation, “The Viva: Who? What? How?” which has the subtitle of Frequently Asked Questions About The PhD Viva. What does it look like? I thought you’d never ask, the cover looks like this:
I had a lot of fun writing Fail Your Viva, and I’m really pleased that people have found it so useful. Last year, as I continued to deliver viva preparation workshops, a thought crossed my mind but I didn’t know what to make of it: people ask me a lot of questions on these workshops, that’s interesting, perhaps I should record them. In the autumn when I started writing this blog regularly I thought that a little series of posts on the common questions about the viva process would be something that people might find useful. The comments and shares that those posts got told me that people wanted more – and then the idea for the book hit me. A book answering the frequently asked questions about the PhD viva.
Et voila!
I used to do a fortnightly round-up of things that I had been sharing or things that I had seen whilst on my travels, and then I stopped doing that. I think it would be a mistake (for now at least) to promise to do that regularly again, so instead I’ll start this irregular series of posts: Interesting Things. The condition for sharing things in these posts is that the thing I’m sharing interests me (or it’s something I’m doing, because I like talking about myself sometimes!).
One of the great things about the kind of job that I have is that I often have time to think and time to play – not video games or role-playing games, although I must have mentioned by now at least once that I like to do both of those – but to play in the sense of trying things out. Trying things out to see what happens. Being my own boss and doing the kinds of things that I do for work gives me a great degree of freedom.
Like this blog: I write when I want, I try to stick to a schedule (although, hello, it’s been a month or so since I posted!) and I write about things that interest me and hope that they interest you too.
Last week I was working with my good friend Dr Aimee Blackledge on a First Year Development Workshop. Aimee talked a little about habits, and this got me thinking, because I also knew that we were going to spend some time on the workshop introducing tools and ideas that are bound up in acronyms for shorthand. I wondered, was there a good little acronym just waiting to be discovered for habits?
I think there was! It hit me some time during the day and I shared it with the cohort of 24 postgraduate researchers, and got feedback quickly that this was a neat little tool for thinking about habits as agents of positive change.
The Christmas break is a pause for work, hopefully. And then there is the New Year, and along with that comes the language of change and resolutions. Instead of just pressing a pause button for work, we need to press a reset button as well – on our practices.
I’m thinking about this a lot. I’ve mentioned before that I like to experiment with my productivity, and I can see that some habits and processes have had a benefit to me:
I can see a danger though (for myself at least) in constantly searching for that trick, that thing which will help you work more productively. Research, skills training and creative work in general are taxing: they demand a lot. I know a couple of my goals for next year, but I have no resolutions as such, save for hitting the reset button: I’m going to stop and review, what I do now and what I used to do. I’m going to see if I can observe a real difference in my work patterns – otherwise I’d best do something else!
What about you? Over the break are you hitting pause, reset or both?
This is the last regular post until January 5th 2015 – I currently plan to do an end of year post on December 31st and a look ahead post on January 1st, but I’m not guaranteeing either!
Thanks for reading, and Merry Christmas!
Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)
It’s all very well and good to do a bit of work to wind down correctly, and to have something in place for your first day back at your PhD, but what about the world unfolding around you? Surely there are things that are happening all of the time while you are having a break, eating mince pies, watching the Queen’s Speech and wondering whether or not the Doctor Who Christmas Special is going to be better than most of the recent series.
(it has to be…it just…has to be!) (please Santa, I’ve been good this year)
Checking and rechecking Twitter and relevant newsfeeds, bookmarking things and reading on the sly and so on – they will interfere with your break. And chances are, if you even remotely suspect that you need a break then you really do. Reducing the value of that break is only going to be harmful in the long run. But what can you do to keep tabs on articles and so on? How can you avoid missing them?
Fortunately, with a couple of bits of internet wonderfulness, you can have simple archives created over the Christmas break, and then review it in your first week back. No distractions, no constant disappearing down a rabbit hole. In the same way that you will not check your inbox until at least January 2nd – promise me you won’t! – create a news inbox to review later.
Yesterday I wrote a little about my pre-Christmas and post-Christmas experiences at the start of my PhD – they were the best of times, they were the worst of times – and also shared the kernels of a few ideas for ways to make your pre-break shutdown and New Year restart the best they can be. In today’s post I’ll go into those four points in more detail. Ready?
Go!
Christmas is coming! We love Christmas in the Ryder house, and while I still have work to do this week, we’re definitely slowing our pace at home (except for increasing pace when it comes to wrapping presents, preparing edible gifts and so on). I don’t have to go and deliver any workshops until January, so there’s definitely time for longer lunches and little breaks for Christmas movies.
During my PhD, especially in my first and second years, at Christmas I was just bouncing off the walls excited. A legitimate break! No guilt for two, or possibly three weeks! No work! Woooooooot!
Perhaps I had the wrong attitude?
In our department we downed tools and just turned up to chat and go for lunch, to swap presents, watch movies in now-empty lecture rooms and just have fun. It wasn’t wrong, and isn’t wrong, to think about and feel excited by a break. The thing that WAS wrong for me was to think only about the break and forget that there is a day coming, possibly a Monday, when I would have to come back to the office or the lab or the library, sit down and get back to work.
And that day SUCKED. Not because I was no longer on break, not because Christmas was another 352 days away, but because all of my projects and work were in complete disarray.
But that first day back does not have to suck. It could have been fine – and your first day back to your PhD after Christmas could be just fine – if you leave your work and projects in a good state before you go.
Since before I started the Viva Survivors Podcast I’ve been delivering viva preparation workshops, and over the last four-and-a-bit years I’ve been asked a lot of questions in a lot of a seminar rooms. Over the last couple of months a regular series of posts on this blog has been about common questions I get asked about the viva. It’s been great to be able to share these, and hopefully they will help those of you that have the viva in your future; it’s been really helpful to me for in a couple of ways too! I’ve had some more writing practise, and it’s helped me think things through for workshops that I have coming up.
But I get asked a LOT of questions, and as I’ve kept records for most of this year I know what keeps coming up again and again. That’s why I’m using these recent posts as a springboard to my second book, which has the working title of “Frequently Asked Questions About The PhD Viva” – which is a very does-what-it-says-on-the-tin sort of name, so we’ll see if that changes. (I like it though!)
So what can you expect from this book?
“How To Tame Your PhD” is the must-own, must-read, ultra-helpful book for PhD students of any and every discipline. Filled with information and insights related to the heart of a postgraduate researcher’s journey, Inger Mewburn has created a how-to guide that I whole-heartedly recommend – in case I wasn’t being clear about how I feel already!
Now, read on for the longer review!