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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.

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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.

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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.

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10 Questions To Ask Yourself At The Start Of Your PhD

So you’re starting a PhD! Congratulations!

October is a time of year that heralds many new starters in postgraduate research. It is ten years to the day that I arrived at Room 524, my office, sat down at my desk and wondered, “What the hell am I doing? What am I supposed to be doing here? Should I just read through my Masters notes until my supervisor calls for me?”

Three interesting questions… But I can think of three better questions to ask yourself at the start of a PhD – in fact I can think of ten! It might be useful for you to work through these and make some notes. They can form the basis for later plans and review.

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Catch Up, 29th September 2014

Every two weeks or so I intend to write a post just like this one – where I’ll talk about what I’ve been posting for the last few weeks, and link to any posts or things I’ve seen that I think are also worth having a read or look at. OK?

On this blog

The last – and first! – two weeks of posts here have been about acronyms, the neatly encapsulated ideas that I use all the time both for myself and for working with postgraduate researchers. I’ve written about INTRO, which helps start presentations; STAR, a technique for talking about your skills; PMI, an idea evaluation tool; and five other acronyms. If you haven’t already, take a look, and let me know in the comments what acronym ideas you find really useful!

Meanwhile, elsewhere

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