It is finished

Last Thursday was my viva. About ten days before last Thursday I wound up in A&E at four in the morning where a very nice doctor told me that my stomach was staging a coup and I should give up caffeine and stress, which is exactly what a person with a crippling caffeine addiction wants to hear ten days before the meeting that passes judgement on the previous four years of their life. Real life can be the biggest hack.

Part of the stress came from having two people whose work I immensely enjoy and respect as examiners. It's usually a mistake to meet your heroes, but passing up the chance to have them read my work just because I was afraid they would prove mortal seemed silly, or at least it did last summer when I was filling in the paperwork. On the train up to Norwich I was pretty certain that they'd tell me to rewrite the entire thing - and on some level I wished that they would tell me to rewrite the entire thing, as coming back to it after three months made all the flaws painfully clear. 

I may have spent the hour before the actual viva sitting in a remote corner of the university campus quietly singing rounds, because singing is the best way to keep yourself from hyperventilating, keeling over, and missing whatever it is that's got you nervous. Or so I've been told.

When I turned up at the internal examiner's office door on Thursday afternoon they seemed positively friendly. 

And then they told me that I'd passed.

And then they told me that, more than finding the thing adequate, they'd actually enjoyed it.

And then it turned into a really interesting conversation about free speech and culture and religion and the limits of legal action and the capacity of fiction to address those things that can't be quantified but which nevertheless influence the tide of history. Philosophy and theory didn't even get a look-in, and no one asked about the books that I hadn't read. 

They didn't really give me corrections - two sentences to delete and some stray typos to correct - so I suppose the next thing to do is get the final, bound version to the university with all of its accompanying paperwork in time to be included on the next pass list, so I can graduate this summer with all of the people I know and like. And I suppose I should start looking for academic posts of a shape that I could fit myself to. And I should probably start thinking about writing another novel. And  now that the thesis is done it needs to be broken down into journal articles, or else built up into a monograph, so it can do someone else some good. And maybe one of these days I'll actually unpack.

But right now my brain is mush, and I've forgotten how to talk. So I'll probably work on peace negotiations with my stomach, and leave everything else 'til next week.

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.