Submitted thesis and need tips for viva please!!

[Poppyliveshere]

I’ve just completed a 4 year partly self funded professional doctorate (psychological trauma) and submitted 4 days ago. Me being me, rather than give myself a few days off, I’ve ploughed headlong into worrying about the viva. Study qualitative and used IPA. Thank you 😊

This Guardian piece is pretty good: www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/jan/08/how-to-survive-a-phd-viva-17-top-tips.

Was your supervisor happy with the submission? Have they supervised several students to PhD graduation? If the answer is yes to both questions, try to relax - you might get difficult questions but you will pass. What type of viva will you have? Mine was a 30 minute presentation plus 15 min q&a with an open audience followed by a closed 2hr examination with 2 assessors. I am quite nervous about public speaking and English isn't my native language so I spent most a lot of time preparing and memorising the presentation. Prepare well but don't worry about it, you know your stuff at this stage

I would think about future directions for your work, what you have learned from.dking the research ( as a researcher) and how your work has contributed to the wider literature. As an external examiner I often ask about methodological issues too depending on how this is addressed in the viva. E.g., why IPA and not TA? Epistemological position? How did you establish quality in your qual research.

Good luck, you know this work inside out. 👍

Read it through a couple of times a few days before. Be ready to say what your original contribution to the field is - both in detail and as an elevator pitch. Try to think of any criticism your examiners might have about any gaps in the thesis, eg anything you didn’t have space or time to cover fully. List any minor typo-type corrections you notice. Don’t spend the next few weeks preparing for it, you should have a break so you can revisit it with fresh eyes.

My viva was a long time ago, but I remember that a lot of the questions seemed to be designed to establish that it really was all my own work. So asking why I'd approached something in the way I had, or asking a question that required me to refer to a specific part of the thesis: 'As I said in Chapter Four when I was discussing....'

As my supervisor said to me, you don't want to look as if you don't know your way around your own thesis.

Thank you! My supervisor is very experienced and has successfully supervised several doctorate students this year alone, all with minors. He’s very happy with my work. I think it’s just a massive case of imposter syndrome at work. I think my weakest area is methodology. Went with IPA but really thought hard about discourse analysis (Foucauldian) but find it hard to talk about why without twisting myself in knots. Viva is just with internal and external, no presentation. Very important area of research although as DProf word count restrictive @56K so a couple of areas that I’d really have liked to go into more detail. Have no idea yet when the date will be set, so prob best to step back from my writing for short while!

Agree with SilverGlassHare. Put it down, gain a bit of distance from it, and revisit it a week before the viva with fresh eyes.

@goingpearshaped

I would think about future directions for your work, what you have learned from.dking the research ( as a researcher) and how your work has contributed to the wider literature. As an external examiner I often ask about methodological issues too depending on how this is addressed in the viva. E.g., why IPA and not TA? Epistemological position? How did you establish quality in your qual research.

Good luck, you know this work inside out. 👍

Thank you. I have really strong ideas about future research, and the limited word count has been frustrating with that. I need to brush up on succinctly talking about why IPA and not FDA that I had originally considered. I gave a good rationale in my methodology but tend to waffle when asked to talk about it. But I do know that my external is really interested in my research (female autism), although not sure what that might mean for the viva? Supervisor is fab and he is more than happy with my submission so just down to me in the viva now 😎