Jul 13

Jul 13 Demystifying the Viva Voce

I passed my viva in June 2022. Here, I am hoping to demystify the viva experience by sharing my own experience of the viva and then some tips for viva preparation.

What to expect when you’re expecting (a viva)

Here’s how the mechanics of the viva work:

The internal examiner, external examiner, and chair all meet around 30 minutes before you arrive, and they discuss your thesis and their opinions on it. Then you have the viva, where the chair introduces you all and then the examiners take turns asking you questions about your work. Then, once the discussion is done, they reconvene without you (or, as I have taken to calling it: they go into conclave), and make their decision. After about 10 minutes (in my experience), they let you back in and tell you how you’ve done and you discuss what to do next. For instance, if you have corrections, you discuss a realistic timeframe to get the corrections done. If you have to revise and resubmit, you discuss the timeframe for that. If you pass with no corrections, they just tell you how to submit the final copy to the library.

Reflections on my viva experience

I am not going to sugarcoat this for you. I was so incredibly nervous. It felt like the nerves I had before my A-Level English exams, where I felt the crushing pressure of all the work I had done and all the aspirations I had for my future were relying on this one moment. I was stepping up to the plate, and I felt sick and sweaty and nervous as hell.

Before it was a very real and imminent prospect, I had said how excited I was for the viva. We were collecting experts on my thesis topic to read it and talk about it, and the viva and corrections are all a part of getting the thesis, rather than an exam or a pass/fail sort of thing.

But, when I was staring it in the face… oh my god, the NERVES.

The viva itself was a weird experience. A lot of topics came up that I expected, such as the route I took to doing this research and why I’d argued certain things, questions about my methodological and theoretical choices, and a particular focus on a particular chapter, which aligned with the expertise of my examiners. But there were some topics that I wasn’t expecting at all. For example, a long discussion on Hegel when I don’t use Hegel in my thesis!

That ten minutes while the examiners deliberate was the longest ten minutes of my life.

I was convinced I had done badly. I felt like my answers were poor imitations of my thoughts, and that my thesis was badly researched and poorly argued, and the viva itself did not demonstrate that I was an expert in my field.

Then, when we reconvened, they told me I’d passed!

Here are some tips to help you prepare for your own viva. I went absolutely over the top with viva prep. So I am including below a list of things that I did, of which you can pick and choose what you might find useful.

1. Find lists of viva questions & write out answers

This is very useful for just getting your thoughts and responses out, and thinking about your thesis as an entire project, as well as specific questions about your approach.

2. Practice saying your answers out loud

This is, after all, an oral exercise. We are all quite used to written exams, and talking about our thesis informally, or giving the rehearsed elevator pitch or conference papers. However, it’s an entirely different kettle of fish to answer questions like this, in this environment, so it’s worth getting used to responding to these questions out loud.

3. Print your thesis

This is something I found so helpful. I printed a copy of my thesis and had it bound, so that I could read it in its physical form.

Here’s when I read it:

There are approximately three months between your submission and your viva. I spent the first two months completely emptying my head of it, doing literally anything else. By the time you’ve submitted, you desperately need space from the thing. Then, two months later, a month before my viva, I printed my thesis and read it. Then I found the viva questions, wrote answers, and practised saying them aloud. I read it again in the two days before my viva, just to make sure it was very very fresh in my mind (or, if I’m being really honest, so that I didn’t have to think about the impending viva). Again, I want to stress that this was complete overkill, but this is what I did.

4. Open your thesis at random pages, formulate questions and answers & say them out loud

This is a really good exercise. This best emulates the experience of the viva, where you don’t know what parts of the thesis the examiners will want to talk about. Make sure you’ve practised talking about every chapter (including your introduction, methodology and literature review, and conclusion!)

5. Get someone else to do the above

Now, it might be that no one else other than your supervisor has read your thesis, and that was certainly the case for me. Nevertheless, find yourself a very patient assistant and have them open your thesis to random pages, scan what you’ve written, and ask you a question about it. They might even have follow-up questions about your answer, and that’s incredibly useful!

6. Assess the sources from your bibliography have been the most useful and practise speaking about them

It’s almost certain that your examiners will ask you about some of the secondary material you have used, particularly the ones you have found relevant throughout the thesis. So make sure you practise speaking about them, paying particular attention to how you have used them.

7. Or, alternatively, do none of these things and go in with a fresh mind

Either (or any) approach is great, and you know your processes best! You’ve come this far, and you know yourself and your research inside out. So you do what you want to do in preparation for the viva!

(some of this content has been previously published by the author on her personal website: TheShelbiad.blogspot.com)

Shelby Judge is an Early Career Academic in Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Derby, researching digital and popular feminist responses to INCELs and the Manosphere. Her doctoral project, undertaken at the University of Glasgow, was “Contemporary Feminist Adaptations of Greek Myth” 2005—2022. This investigated the current trend of women writers retelling Greek myths and what this illuminates about current concerns within feminism. Due to the popularity and proliferation of this genre, her work into this field is ongoing. Shelby’s overarching research interests are in feminist and queer theory and contemporary British and North American women’s fiction. She has published on topics including #MeToo and the Trojan War, Instapoetry, queer theory and Ovid, and embodied fantasy. She is also a regular contributor to the Literary Encyclopedia, for which she has written articles on the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy and Margaret Atwood.

Follow her on Twitter: @judgeyxo

Read more about her work here: TheShelbiad.blogspot.com and www.researchgate.net/profile/Shelby-Judge