How to prepare for your PhD thesis defence

one of the most common questions i get asked by phd students is how to prepare for your thesis defense so i'm going to give some tips in this video but first of all i want to say that the real preparation for your defense starts as soon as you begin your phd the most important thing that you can do is get used to discussing your work with other academics getting feedback talking about ideas because that is going to be ultimately the best possible preparation for when you get to the defense so you do not want your thesis defense to be the first time that you're getting feedback on your work so the defense itself the format varies greatly from one institution to another and between different countries so in my case because i did my phd in the uk i had a viva examination with two examiners one from my own institution and one external and it was basically like a long interview to talk about all the different aspects of my research in other countries it's common to have a public defense with a panel of examiners and an audience of colleagues and maybe also family and friends so the process and the experience can be quite different so the first and most obvious tip is simply to know the format of your defense knowing whether whether or not you have to give a presentation how long that presentation needs to be all of those kind of things now you can do this by simply checking the administrative guidelines talking to your supervisor but another thing you can do is talk to people who have been through the process in your institution so phd students who've been through exactly what you're going to go through because they will be in the best possible position to tell you what to expect and if you're at an early stage of your phd and you're at an institution where they do public defenses then attend one see what it's like and then when it's your turn you know exactly what to expect now if you do have to give a presentation then the thing to remember is that you don't have to cover absolutely everything that you know your presentation will be followed by some questions so if there's something that the examiners want to know more about then they will ask you one of the worst things that you can do for a presentation is show up with a hundred slides for a 10-minute presentation and then try and rattle through everything as fast as you possibly can that's going to be extremely stressful for you and it's also going to be difficult for the examiners or the audience to follow so it's better to say less and to focus on your strongest content focus on what you really want to communicate to the examiners and then as i said they can always ask you questions if there's something that's not in your presentation that they want to ask about of course remember they will have read your thesis so anything that's not in your presentation they will have read anyway and then they will guide the conversation wherever they want it to go of course it's always good to practice your presentation as well if you can do this in front of an audience if you can do a mock examination of any kind that's always really good but if you don't have that opportunity then you can practice yourself but practice out loud sometimes what people do is practice simply by looking through the slides without speaking it out loud so try to actually say it out loud even if you're in an empty room now this can feel a little bit embarrassing it can feel a little bit silly but it's not going to be as stressful as the defense itself so anything that you can do just to practice under slightly stressful conditions will be good preparation for when you actually have the defense and then you will know how long it takes you to get through the different sections you'll know if your presentation is too long or too short and you can adjust accordingly now whatever the format of your defense whether you're on whether or not you have to give a presentation everybody dreads the awkward question that horrible moment when the examiner asks you something that you don't know the answer to what people sometimes do to try to prepare for this is simply cram as much as possible read as much literature as possible on everything that could possibly come up i think this is a little bit counterproductive because no matter how much you read there will always be more and sometimes what happens is you just realize how much you don't know and that affects your affects your confidence so i think it's better to accept that you don't know everything you're not expected to know everything and find a way to answer questions that you don't know the answer to so the way that i recommend you do this is to actually say well i don't know but i would guess that because of this reason and this reason this is what would happen but you would need to do this kind of experiment or this kind of study in order to find out find out for certain so the examiner isn't necessarily looking for you to get the exact right answer there may not be a right answer maybe nobody knows the answer to this particular question and they're just asking out of curiosity or to see how you think through a problem that you don't know the answer to so as long as you show your thought thought process as long as you show that you can think as a professional academic researcher having a peer-to-peer conversation with another academic that is what they are looking for so you just say i don't know but and then that can lead to an interesting conversation as you discuss that particular idea now while you're not expected to know everything of course there will be some core content that you are expected to know well that content which is central to your research and to your thesis but this content is set by you not the examiner and it's determined by what you put into your thesis so as you're writing your thesis you are choosing the ground that you want to defend so it makes sense to focus on the areas where you are stronger rather than focusing on the areas where you are weaker and then trying to put things in to fill those gaps if you're putting in a lot of content to try to pretend that you know a particular area really well or to show the examiner how much you know it will come across when you're less confident or less knowledgeable in those areas and then it's much more likely that the examiner asks you about those areas where you are weaker so as part of the preparation for your defense it's choosing the content that you put into your into your thesis and focusing primarily on your strongest stuff so in your preparation for the defense after you've submitted what you can do is strengthen some of those core areas one way you can do this is look at more recent articles that have maybe been published since you wrote your literature review or since you submitted your thesis the way to find these papers is to think of a handful of core papers that your research absolutely relies upon so in most cases there will be you know maybe 10 possibly 20 rarely more than that core essential papers that if they didn't exist your research wouldn't be possible these will be the things that you've referred to again and again and again throughout your research now it's likely that anybody else doing similar research to you is going to cite some of those same key papers so if you look those up and check the cited by information and look for recent citations of those core papers that's a very quick way of updating your knowledge of the latest most relevant literature but this updated literature search is focused around your research not around all of the gaps in your knowledge because they are impossible to completely fill now no matter how well you prepare when the examination comes you will be nervous it would be really weird if you weren't nervous because everything that you've been working towards for the past several years comes down to this one event so what's the best way to deal with those nerves now the day before or the couple of days before your examination i think it's good to think of anything that you can do to be as prepared as possible in terms of little practicalities so for example what are you going to wear do you have those clothes prepared are they clean and ironed and ready to go is that decision made if you have to travel to your defense do you have that planned is everything prepared so you know exactly where you have to be and how you're going to get there with enough margin for error so that if anything goes wrong then you've got some safety nets you've got some margin of error built in now as i'm recording this it's in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic so there are not many in-person defenses happening most of them are happening online so in that case what you can do is prepare this space where you are going to do your defense so where are you going to do it what is the background like you don't want to be doing your thesis defense in front of an unmade bed for example so choose exactly where you're going to do it and have that all set up make sure your desk is nice and clear you've got a nice background all your clothes are ready those kind of things another quick tip if you're doing it online is to get hold of an internet cable rather than using wi-fi because that's usually more stable you don't want to be worried about internet stability of course some of that is outside of your control but if you use a cable it tends to be a little bit more a little bit more reliable so anything you can think of in terms of little practical details try and do those in the days before your examination partly so that you give yourself something to do and also partly to know that you've taken care of everything that you can on the day of the examination itself the worst part is often the waiting the waiting to start because there's not a lot that you can do so to minimize it won't eliminate but to minimize some of that stress first of all avoid caffeine because that is only going to add to the anxiety you can give yourself some really easy simple things to do just make a to-do list of random tasks just to keep yourself busy so you've got somewhere to direct that nervous energy again it won't eliminate that nervous energy but it at least channels it in some way then once the defense actually starts you might find a lot of people report this you might find that the knowledge just takes over and that when you're talking about your work you know the nerves kind of disappear because you're just focused on that on that conversation but of course you may still be a little bit nervous you might find yourself talking really quickly you get stuck on a particular train of thought and in some cases you might even forget what the original question is in that case it's okay to slow down to say to the examiners i'm sorry i got caught up in my train of thought there what was the original question again or if they ask a question that you're unclear about or you don't quite understand you can ask them to clarify or to repeat the question it's okay to ask for a little bit of time to think all of these things are okay the examiners expect you to be nervous and they will help you out so if you catch yourself talking too fast going off on a train of thought slow down bring yourself back to the original question give yourself a little bit of time to breathe then you know give it give it your best shot like i said the expect you to be nervous and they will help you out now even though it is this big scary kind of stressful thing often people report that they actually enjoy the defense the reason is that it's for many people the only opportunity that they get to spend a couple of hours talking to people about what they've been doing for the last few years to be talking to experts in the field who are interested in what you've done it's very rare to get that opportunity to go into that much depth and it can actually be quite a pleasant enjoyable experience so if you like this video please do give it a thumbs up on youtube because that helps other people to find it because it feeds into the algorithm and they will show it to more people if you know somebody who is preparing for their defense please do forward the video to them also don't forget to subscribe and hit the notification bell so you know when new videos are published and also if you'd like to know more about what i do check out the links below to my websites there are two of them there's jamesonphd.com where i have hundreds of blog posts on all things phd and also the phd academy where we do courses we've got recorded courses on all kinds of aspects from academic writing to time management working with academic literature those kind of things we also do weekly zoom calls and we've got a whole community of phd students that you can connect with so check that out in the link below that's it from me best of luck if you have a defense coming up comment below let me know how it went and i'll see you next time

Channel: James Hayton PhD

Views: 17,611

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Id: DUMD_RBp_W8

Length: 13min 50sec (830 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 01 2021