Preparing For Your PhD Thesis Defense Viva | Questions You WILL Be Asked

hey everyone and welcome back to my channel so in today's video I'm going to be debunking the scariness of a PhD viver so I'm going to be going through exactly how you want to prepare for your PhD a Viva examination so I finished my PhD at the University College London um and in the department of cell and developmental biology and when I finished my PhD I was fortunate enough to have no corrections I think I had one spelling mistake actually to be precise and my examiners absolutely loved everything I spoke about during the Vive examination and I truly think that a lot of it came down to the things that I prepared and the points that I made during that particular sitting with the examiners but I'm here to say that first and foremost there's nothing to be worried about and everything I'm going to mention in today's video all eight points are things that you you probably already know you're probably already super confident about and to remember the fact that you are the expert of this thesis The Examiner is doesn't know as much as you know with your particular thesis and the minute that that clicked in my mind I was no longer scared or worried or anxious about what was to come the moment that I realized I can question them and they won't know what I am going to say um so you know they're just there to have a discussion it's a discussion it's an academic discussion between the academics the examiners and you the academic so ultimately there's nothing to be worried about I think there's one thing that you take away from today's video it's there's nothing to be worried about you've got this um of course there are ways to prepare and that's what I'm going to be going through in today's video okay the first thing that I did was to firstly read my thesis but read it in a printed out version but not in your typical printed out version the thick fat version but rather in a version that is slightly condensed so what I did was because my thesis was quite a lot of pages I believe it was like 200 pages long what I did was I printed it out in a version that has four pages per A4 page now I mean this really depends on your eyesight my eyesight is pretty good so I can see it really well you might want to print two per page but I did this so that I could have my thesis accessible to me wherever I go so I started preparing for my examination I would say like a few weeks before and but I really went hardcore maybe like two weeks before I would say so I wanted a version that I could kind of like slip into my bag read on the tube and you know logging a thesis that's 200 pages around with you is just really not feasible um so what I did was printed it out and it gave me something to carry and hold and just kind of scribble in a very accessible way so that was my first top tip that I did the second thing is to start reading your thesis and this I'm going to call the first read so the first read of your thesis needs to start to happen pretty quickly because if your thesis is as long as mine it might take a while but whilst doing this you want to think about certain questions and certain points that they might be asking you so whilst reading you want to constantly be saying to yourself could this be a question so I've mentioned a method here could they ask me to justify it I've mentioned a particular paper that's really important for the research question or for The Gap could they ask me to justify you know why I've selected that paper could they ask me so constantly having that question of what could their question be is really important when you're doing that first read so some things you want to look out for are things like recurring literature what papers come up again and again any key methods that you're mentioning and that you're using any really important keywords justifications for methods or any approaches and most importantly any statistical analysis that you use so if you're mentioning that you've got P numbers or t-tests or and anything that you're doing to do with stats you need to be able to justify that you need to be able to say why your data fits that particular t-test why is your data appropriate to be used for that particular statistical test that you used because they are likely going to ask you that it's not good enough to say my supervisor told me to do it you need to know why your data suits it and the likelihood is they don't like they don't have the answers so if you if you're confident enough to say well my data is continuous non-continuous Etc and that suits this t-test they'll be like yeah cool they don't actually you know they don't have your your data in front of them so it's more about knowing being confident and giving an answer and then expecting them to ask you specific nitty-gritty details which they don't have time to do in that particular sitting so more specifically your examiner expects you to show a critical analysis of your own work and that of others appreciate the limitations of the methods and also the results obtained by yourself but also others that you've mentioned in your thesis know the broad conclusions of your thesis and how they support the Gap in literature and also how they conflict or add to previous work again that you've mentioned and also to know the concepts and the reason developments in your subject so I'll talk about that a bit more in a second bear these things all in mind when you're reading your your your thesis for that first read so that first read is probably going to be the long and the slowest the longest and the slowest process just because you you you are looking out for quite a few things and you'll see like in my thesis what I've done is I've just scribbled loads of things down I put question marks I've used highlights I've I've got like tabs all down the side and it's actually this is a really memorable document for me because it really shows me and reminds me of how much work and effort went into reading it for the first time and it really is quite like significant and I'm never going to get rid of this okay so now you've read your thesis the third thing you want to do is move on to literature so you know over the course of your PhD you read a ton of literature you want to pick out the main ones that come up again and again in your thesis so at this point you're no you're no longer searching for new papers you're looking at your thesis and you're saying what have I mentioned in my thesis um kind of to do with the Gap in literature to do with important data that you might have inferred from or used or contested against or added to any research that you've mentioned in your thesis anything that you've mentioned in your thesis that that means that you've read that paper and you've understood it so if you've cited or referenced anything in your thesis that is a space to say for your examiner to say well um you've mentioned this paper what you know what relevance does this have to your work and you can't say I don't know right so you need to make sure that if you've mentioned a paper multiple times I would say anything more than like five times make sure you know what that paper is about for the most part to do this you can just read the abstract or you can just kind of get a quick gist of how it relates to your work if you don't already know and you probably probably already know this but just bear that in mind that they can ask you about the work of others if you've mentioned it in your paper and if it seems to be significant enough that you've mentioned it enough times for them to have pointed out but on the theme of papers and literature you want to also do a quick search and I'd probably do this like the day or two days before your your examination do a quick search on any new or recent papers that have you know been published since you wrote your thesis so like my thesis I wrote in August of 2017 and that's like the last final version so I probably actually wrote it in like June or July and my Viva was in November so between you know June to November a new paper could have been very easily have been published um that adds to my field and it's not good enough for me to say I didn't know that um because you're still you know you're still in that PhD program and that examiner might actually be someone who may have published that work or might have a collaborator that's published that work and will be excited to speak to you about what you think about this new development and if you say I don't know it that doesn't really like it's not space like you know it's not enough for them to disqualify you obviously but it doesn't look good if you haven't researched the latest kind of upcoming Publications in your in your field one way of doing this really easily is just asking a supervisor hey have you seen any recent papers that you think um I you know might come up and I'm sure he or she will help you with that the fourth is to take some time to re-read and re-look at the work of your supervisor and also the examiners so there's actually a template that I have created for preparing for your PhD and the last page here you can see I've included a bit of a summary for what to kind of pick out about the examiners so your examiners are coming as experts in their field and there's a reason why you selected them maybe they are aligned um or have some kind of common knowledge with your methods that you use or maybe like they're interested in the protein that you're working on but they obviously have some sort of Interest or similarity or likeliness to your work and your research so you need to kind of try to figure out and try to kind of find out what angles they might be coming from so one of my examiners had a background more in the physics side of what I was looking at and my PhD was very much biology based a little bit of like biophysics a bit of like migration movement that kind of thing so I had a I had a thought and I had a you know we had a we had an idea that maybe he might be asked he might come and ask me about the motility side of things and there was a little bit in my thesis that I didn't actually do and my like co-collaborator did and I mentioned that there and he actually did ask me about it and had I not thought that he'd be interested in his own background I wouldn't have prepared for it so it's really important to think about right what are their interests what's their research interest and how could they try to find a question that they could ask about their stuff but with my thesis so like I said with the um template that I've designed that last page really prompts you and really makes you think about the different ways that your examiners and your work could link the fifth step is to now do a second read of your beautiful thesis so you've done a first read you've read your literature you've you've checked up on your your supervisor and your examiners and now you need to go back to the literature again and do a second read but in the second read what you want to do is now focus more on each chapter so you want to start from you know your introduction focus on the introduction and say right what is the main kind of gist of this introduction what am I saying what is my Gap what am I trying to justify um and summarize that and again I've got chapter summaries for each of the chapters and within my viver preparation templates and at each chapter there are slightly different questions that you want to ask or you may be asked as well so I've also included those in each of those chat summaries as well so like when you're in the methods you want to think more about justifying like why did you choose that cell type why did you choose the participants why did you choose a group of a hundred and not a thousand why did you have an end number like you know you need to really be able to justify everything and those are the kind of questions that they are going to ask you again it's a discussion they just want to know why did you choose a hundred and not a thousand then once I had completely exhausted my thesis and literature I then started thinking about potential more general questions that they could ask me to things like why you know what did you enjoy about your PhD they do ask you those questions what are you doing next um what are your career goals and what did you enjoy about about this lab or what was your favorite technique and like just general questions that you probably don't prepare for um they do ask you this because like I said it's a discussion they actually want to get to know you and they actually want to like make it a pleasurable experience so I've got a list of questions as well within the template that um like I said I will leave the link for it down below that you can see and these are all questions that are a bit more generalized and that they usually ask at the start or they'll ask it um towards the end the seventh step is that I've now done all of my reading I've you know prepared as much as I can there's no really much more you can do but you do want to practice public speaking because you are speaking in front of an audience in the UK you usually just have your examiners there your internal and your external examiners sometimes you maybe have you may have your supervisor there as well for whatever reason but usually it's just two however in Europe um as in like in other like Germany for example or Spain um they're via PhD or even France I know for France for sure um their PHD virus tend to be more of a public event so they'll have like their family and friends in the audience and it'll be like in a little seminar room and they'll have like their colleagues there and their lab friends and everything and they'll present their work and they'll be asked questions by the audience so it's more of a presentation as opposed to what ours feels like in the UK which is more of an examination um so either way you're speaking to an audience so you want to practice public speaking so what I'd rep what I'd recommend is doing a bit of a mock fiver so if you can grab a few people people ideally those that are in your Fields so I probably I did it with my lab my lab group so one of the meetings that we have like I think we have we used to have meetings every week for one of the meetings I was like can I present my work and they went yeah sure so I presented my work I did a quick I think it was like a 15-20 minute presentation presented my work and I was like ask me questions critique it just be as harsh as possible and I got as many tips as I could about how I presented my images or like what I said I got some good question like prompts they made me think about certain things which was really helpful um because they're not my examiners right so it's good to get that advice beforehand and then last but not least like you've done the hard work now there's really nothing more you can do you're gonna you'll be absolutely fine like you're going to be able to do this the last thing is prepare the things that you need for the day so I took this with me of course um but I also printed out a few extra pages for things so I think I've got them in here actually so I think I printed out like a few pages within like my discussion that had a diagram that I thought that they might ask me about um because like you know they're not the experts in your field and I keep having to say this because I think we think they they're testing us they don't know everything that we know you know as a student you're the one that knows it so they ultimately need to be able to justify um and and ask you those questions so I I thought I think there's a diagram in one of my in my thesis that I thought that they might ask me about so I printed it out in in big so I'm not like flapping around with this little thing and I think they did ask me actually I was like oh here it is and I gave it to them to see and I feel quite impressed by that and even things like extra data if you have like a graph that you really wanted to fit in but it wasn't relevant for your thesis but you think they might ask you about it print it out um I would say no more than like five sheets of paper because imagine you've got 50 sheets of paper and you're now flapping around trying to find the right one um no more than five okay just so it's really obvious like what you have and what you want to talk about um yeah that's my top tip um but yeah I hope that you found this helpful um it really like I said it's go into the mindset that I'm going to be fine it's just a discussion they're just engaging engaging in an academic you know discussion they're not testing me if I've got to this stage and my supervisor has allowed me to sit in front of these two examiners like you know surely they wouldn't allow these examiners if you were you know if you weren't going to pass um so you you will do absolutely fine um just a few things to prepare for this preparation you could really do it in I would say a minimum of 10 days so spending like one day working on the thesis um in a kind of a few days on each chapter they're looking at literature going back to thesis preparing like some questions and you're good to go um 10 days I don't even say five days really it depends on the Gap I think as well on how you know how far a go you wrote thesis but if it was not too long ago then you could do it in five to ten days absolutely fine but yeah I'll leave a link for this template in my description down below if you want to grab it it's um quite quite extensive it allows you to really think quite in in depth about the different parts of your thesis and um I'd highly recommend like I said printing out your thesis as well so you have a nice copy that you can just run around with too and helps so much any other tips please let me know in the description in the comments down below and I'll see you guys in my next video bye

Channel: Dr Amina Yonis

Views: 20,684

Keywords:

Id: yliTtNnnITk

Length: 18min 19sec (1099 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 15 2023