Friday 12 May 2017

Staring down the viva

On Monday Belief finally got to the point that someone else could read it without me immediately dying of shame. So I sent it off to Lucy, only six months later than I originally intended to. It isn't a short book, and it certainly isn't a tidy book just yet, so there's no point eating my fingernails while watching my inbox for guidance on how to make it a tidy book. Which means there's nothing keeping me from prepping for my viva. And since I originally created this blog as a record of my stumblings through higher education, the whole thing would lack symmetry if I didn't record how I'm going to be doing that.

First off, 'viva' is short for 'viva voce,' which in this context is taken to mean 'defending with the living voice.' In the English system the doctoral candidate is usually orally examined on the thesis, and the examination is a factor in whether the candidate passes. In the case of UEA, the examination is performed by one member of the university, and one member from an external university, whose work is related to the subject of the thesis. I've been more than a little annoyed with my fellow Americans in the past couple of months because they can't seem to wrap their minds around this; they think the whole thing is a formality and the hard work was over when I handed in.

As far as prepping for the viva is concerned, the first thing I did was panic, because that's seemingly the first thing everyone does, and because everyone I asked who had already done it told me that the best prep was to pray, bargain, cry, and eat chocolate, which is realistic but not very helpful. The second thing I did was google around to see how people I don't know prepped for theirs, which was marginally more helpful.

The advice I found broke down into two basic categories: know your opponent, and know yourself. A bunch of them are common sense, but when you're panicking even common sense seems like black magic.

1) Hunt up the university's Examiner Report forms, and their guidelines for examiners. They'll outline exactly what constitutes a pass, a pass with corrections, a rewrite, a fail, and any other outcomes the school considers possible. That will let you skew your responses to questions so that they demonstrate your achievement of the benchmarks.

2) Find and read the examiners' work. Get a sense of what they are preoccupied with, what their views might be on your material, and how they build your arguments. In my case, discover that the external has written critical essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and immediately fangirl to hell and back.

3) Find out what's been published in your field since you stopped gathering material. In the same vein, make a list of what you left out of the thesis, or the literature review, and be able to defend why.

4) Put together a list of sample questions that might be asked, and start thinking about how you might answer them. There are scads of sample questions out there, all you need to do is Google. Which sounds dirty, out of context.

5) Review the actual thesis. Read the whole thing again. Put in flags to mark where chapter and section breaks are so you don't have to shuffle too much finding them. Highlight important quotes. Make a list of typos as you go through so that you can get right on to correcting them after the viva is over, and so you can strategically bring it out if typos come up in the meeting to let the examiners know that you're on top of them. Write a one-page summary of each chapter of the thesis. Look up how to pronounce words that you're not sure of, or the names of authors whose work you reference.

6) Consider what you're willing to defend to the death, and what's up for compromise. This is probably more dependant on what discipline you're in, and how subjective the work is.

7) Write down the questions that you want to ask the examiners, so you don't forget them on the day.

8) Figure out the practical concerns, such as how you're going to get there on the day.

And that seems to be all that one can realistically do. So I'm going to go off and do it.

And I'm going to eat chocolate while I'm doing it.

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