Is your viva looming? Here, Emily Beswick, who completed her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh, shares her viva experience and offers you some valuable advice whilst preparing for yours! How can you attempt to predict discussion topics, how should you work back through your thesis, and do you know why you did what you did during your PhD?
1. Read, read and read it again
Take the time to read your thesis with ‘fresh’ eyes. For me, this meant printing a physical copy with text on one side so I could make notes on the opposite page, but this can look different for everyone. Opening the document in a new software, changing the font face, or printing it out enables you to really read what is on the page and distil the key points into your own notes. Everyone approaches this in different ways, many people choosing to read a new chapter each day, or in my friend’s case doing a ‘café crawl’ and reading a chapter in each new location.
2. Know your audience
Find out as much as you can about your examiners. What are their research interests, and how do they align with your thesis? You cannot predict their questions, but you can predict the areas that they may be particularly interested in and might want to discuss in more detail. Reading about their current work, looking over past publications, talking to colleagues and considering their social media presence can go a long way to helping you understand the types of discussions that you might have.
3. Prepare your elevator pitch
Be prepared to summarise your entire thesis in a two-minute elevator-pitch style, ensuring it is engaging and accessible to another researcher (who may be in a slightly different field to you). Focus on what your work adds to scientific knowledge and why this gap is important to address. This is an opportunity to take a breath, break the ice and highlight what you think is key for the examiners to know; this will likely be one of the first parts of the viva discussion.
4. Redo literature reviews
If you have any systematic reviews as a part of your thesis, or aspects of your introduction that particularly focus on cutting-edge aspects of your research area, re-run the literature searches. Check if there is any new published literature, or preprints, that might be relevant and could potentially come up in discussion. You can never read every paper that there ever was, or ever will be, but reading at least the abstract of the most recent contributions to the field can help you feel more prepared for a discussion. Focus on what you did differently to these researchers, and how this new knowledge links to your own work.
5. Background questions
A large portion of the viva is discussing your thesis in context, considering what your findings add and why you did what you did. I found these questions from Twitter (or X!) to be helpful for considering what my thesis added. Preparing short responses beforehand to questions like these can make you think more deeply about the ‘why’.
Considering the impact of your science is important and be prepared to have a discussion about the context of the research; what came beforehand and why is the research question worth answering?
What motivated you to carry out this research?
What issue in society does your research address?
What are the three most important papers that relate to your thesis?
What published work is closest to yours and why is yours different?
What are the most recent developments in your area?
Why did you use your research methodology?
To what extent do your contributions generalise?
How does your thesis contribute to knowledge?
What are the strongest and weakest parts of your work?
6. Acknowledge, but accept, your studies’ limitations
A crucial part of the viva is thinking about the methods you used and considering why you used them. One way to do this is by focusing on the limitations sections that you have written for each chapter. It is important to consider what you would have done differently at the time, if you had the understanding you have now. With the beauty of hindsight, there might be decisions that you would change, or alternative methods that you would have used. However, instead of focusing entirely on what you would have done differently, consider why it was the right decision with the information you had at the time. Remember that these were written at the chronological end of each study. Be confident in your judgement and acknowledge that the decision was made at that time for a reason.
7. Revise the techniques that you used
For lab-based PhDs, this will likely mean reviewing the methods that you used, ensuring that you are comfortable explaining them, particularly those which are more unusual and novel. If any techniques were performed by other people, or outsourced off-site, ensure that you are confident talking about the methods and how they contribute to the findings. These may be more likely to be discussed within the viva, to consider why they were used over more standard protocols, and how the findings can be interpreted. In other PhDs, this may be particularly focused around the statistical analysis techniques that you used to analyse your data. Focus on being able to summarise and justify these techniques succinctly, and in context with your work. For PhDs similar to mine that use standardised clinical rating scales, an understanding of the scales themselves can be helpful to revise and refresh. The number of items, concepts evaluated, and why this scale was chosen, over those with similar aims, are also important topics to keep in mind.
8. Enjoy yourself!
But most crucially of all, enjoy it! Many people imparted this advice before my viva and I thought that they were completely missing the mark, but I really did end up enjoying it. You will have worked so hard to write the thesis, revise, and edit endless drafts, and it can be quite isolating at times to get through the final push. The viva is a unique chance to justify all of your hard work, and to demonstrate your passion, with people who genuinely share your enthusiasm about your niche topic.
Trust me when I say - it will be a fulfilling finale to your years of hard work.
This article was written by Emily Beswick and edited by Rebecca Pope. Interested in writing for WiNUK yourself? Contact us through the blog page and the editors will be in touch!
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