En garde!!
Preparing to defend your thesis
Gooooooooood morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you might happen to be!
This week has been a very, very busy one, even though the biggest event in it happened on Tuesday: my PhD student successfully defended her thesis!!! 🎉
The experience was a little bit odd for me, since I was actually the internal examiner (this is a quirk of my institution, and not how things are usually done). Thankfully, there was also an incredible external examiner whom I asked to take the lead during the event itself, which was public!
Looking back at my own defense, many moons ago, I’m grateful mine wasn’t open to the public (apparently members of the public technically could have attended, but Cambridge wasn’t in the habit of announcing things like when and where Ms. Mary Flannery’s PhD viva would be taking place). It took place in a tiny office in the Faculty of English, and when I walked in the room all four volumes of the massive medieval English poem I’d written about were stacked on a table. (To this day, I still don’t know if that’s because they wanted to test my knowledge or because they needed it for themselves.)
The thesis defense is a weird beast, one that varies from institution to institution. But the basics are the same: you’re there to field questions about the biggest piece of scholarship you’ve ever produced, and your answers need to be good enough for your examiners to decide that you and your work have earned a PhD (even if you might need to undertake a few revisions first).
I always thought I would be terrified on the day of my viva voce examination, but I was actually excited. I couldn’t wait to talk about my work (and maybe a little part of me just couldn’t wait to get it all over with).
Since then, I’ve been asked by a lot of PhD students about the best way to prepare for a thesis defense. Here are a few of my favourite answers:
Know your work. By the time your defense rolls around, it’s probably been months since you last worked on your thesis. Crack that sucker open again! Remind yourself of what you covered, and what you didn’t. Which brings me to the next thing you need to do.
Know which choices you made, and why. This is the big one, in my opinion. The whole point of a PhD is to become equipped for independent, original research. And to prove that you are equipped, you need to be able to explain the decisions you made while conducting your research and writing your thesis. And the answer should never, ever be ‘my supervisor told me to’—you can always indicate that you discussed something with your supervisor, or that they made a particular suggestion or drew something to your attention, but ultimately the only person responsible for that thesis is you.
Check for any final errata. This is a small thing, but I think it’s psychologically helpful to arrive at your defense already knowing what tiny errors (spelling, punctuation, etc.) still need to be fixed. In an ideal world there won’t be (m)any, but showing up with a printed list shows you’re on top of things, and will help you feel like you’re on top of things, too.
Be prepared to talk about how you might have done things differently, or where you might take your arguments next. This kind of relates to Number 2 above. In addition to being prepared to explain your decision-making, you should also be prepared to talk a little bit about what you didn’t cover, or what you would like to include if you revise your thesis for publication as a book. This doesn’t mean you have to have a whole other thesis in your head, ready to go—it just means that you should be prepared to say a few words about how you might potentially develop your argument in new directions, or how it might be affected by evidence you chose not to include, or what you wish you’d had time/space to cover.
Remember to take your time. You don’t have to respond to questions as soon as they’re uttered! Give yourself a moment to reflect. Take a couple of breaths. Heck, take a couple of notes. If you’re someone who gets stressed out by silence, you can always fall back on ‘filler’ phrases that buy you a few seconds or help you to frame a response: ‘Thank you for asking that’. ‘That’s a great question’ (though I wouldn’t recommend you use this more than once or twice!). Or even ‘That’s a really difficult question for me to answer because X’. If you feel comfortable enough, you can also try thinking aloud: ‘My first instinct would be to say X, but of course that doesn’t account for Y’. (I just asked Le Swiss if he had any tips for these situations and he said that, in an emergency, you can always say ‘hmm’ and clean your glasses.)
Remember: it’s ok to disagree with your examiners. Being an academic is all about disagreeing with people. After all, what is ‘original’ research if not research that somehow ‘disagrees’ with all the other research that’s out there? So if one or more of your examiners doesn’t agree with your approach or terminology or argument, that doesn’t mean you need to give in to their point of view. Quite the contrary: it’s your job to say that you disagree (assuming you do), and to explain why you do.
Remember: it’s ok not to have ALL the answers. The best vivas don’t feel like exams, and they definitely don’t feel like swordfights (though, if you need a laugh, you should check out this piece by Luke Burns on the ‘snake fight’ portion of your thesis defense). The best vivas feel like conversations. Yes, those conversations still need to prove your competence, but that competence isn’t just related to what you know, but also how you think. Be prepared for your examiners to bring up something you never thought of (or heard of) and ask you something along the lines of ‘What do you think about that?’ or ‘How might your arguments be applied to this?’ or even ‘Do you think you would revise your arguments in light of this?’ They’re not trying to trip you up (or at least they shouldn’t be trying to do that). They’re just trying to see how you think when confronted with new evidence or arguments or possibilities. So don’t feel like you have to know everything when you walk into your defense. Just be prepared to speculate a little, or to come up with new hypotheses, and to explain your thinking.
My last tip is really just another reminder: a viva is the one chance in your life when you’ll get to have an in-depth conversation about your work with interested people who know it nearly as well as you do. It’s basically a group geek-out. And that’s a pretty awesome thing!
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VB,
M