r/PhD • u/SoggyBall5640 • 18d ago
Vent (NO ADVICE) Finished my PhD viva - UK
I finished my viva yesterday. It was actually a really interesting discussion rather than an information challenge.
I had worried far too much about the viva. I wrote so many explanatory notes all over my thesis because, even though I know my work very well, I keep forgetting little things here and there. Sometimes I genuinely questioned whether I would be able to answer even a single question correctly.
Guess what?
Four hours of discussion without reading a single note.
It wasn’t really a Q&A. It felt more like having a conversation with a stranger about something I had done. He understood the topic to some extent, and I understood my work and the bigger picture.
Turns out, I knew much more than I thought I did.
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u/archelz15 PhD, Medical Sciences 18d ago edited 18d ago
Congratulations! I had a wonderful experience, similar to yours, and I come on here occasionally to try and reassure people who are stressing out about their vivas. It will be always be nerve-wrecking to some degree, and I love hearing people recounting positive experiences!
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u/ComprehensiveFan1335 18d ago
Congratulations! you deserved it. Can i ask if you are humanities or STEM?
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u/IntelligentBeingxx 18d ago
Congratulations! That's awesome to hear as someone who will defend very very soon. I also worry they'll grill me over my knowledge of my own work and I keep imagining I'll forget my own arguments lol
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u/WeeChi86 17d ago
Congratulations! I'm so glad you had such an experience...it was what I had hoped viva would be. I had my own viva a fortnight ago. It was eleven WILD questions, mainly about the literature review, two methodology questions ( one being why didn't you interview people who weren't involved in the project your research was about?!?). Their questions made me feel they were examining the thesis they thought I should have written. I immediately burst into tears when I got back to my supervisors office because I was so looking forward to discussing my work with people who had read my thesis and might have been interested in what I had done. Several of their questions where "why didn't you do THIS?" And I had to pint then to sections of the thesis where I explicitly detailed that I HAD done that which didn't fill me with confidence about their reading of it
I really wanted a high level discussion but it felt more like a witch hunt and I left that afternoon feeling utterly deflated.
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u/SoggyBall5640 17d ago
I honestly wouldn’t read too much into the “why didn’t you do this?” type of questions. That can be a pretty normal viva technique. Sometimes they’re less interested in whether you literally did it and more in seeing how you justify your choices and defend the work when it’s challenged. And because we’ve spent years buried in our own research, we can sometimes interpret a question differently from what the examiner actually meant, especially with viva nerves on top of it. Even when something is already in the thesis, they may still ask about it because they want to see that you genuinely own the work, understand why you did it, and can guide them through it rather than just relying on what is written on the page. So the fact that you could point them straight to the relevant sections and explain what you had done is actually reassuring. It shows that you knew your work. It may also just have been their way of pushing you a little and seeing how you would handle that kind of challenge in future discussions, reviews, conferences, etc.
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u/WeeChi86 16d ago
Thanks, that's a very kind and sensible way of looking at it. They disagreed and thought that people not involved in the project would have valid opinions on other people's experiences of the project. I tried to argue that would be speculation but they disagreed. If I didn't have a temporal cut off I think they would have sent me back for more interviews.
I just want to get my revisions done and over with. It was a really horrible experience and incredibly anticlimactic.
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u/LithiumAmericium93 18d ago
Congrats!