The three soft-bound copies of my novel + critical thesis (all 140,000 words of it); these went to the two examiners and the viva chair. In the past week I had a milestone birthday, and I passed my viva and finished my PhD. It's been ... eventful.
Sitting a viva is nerve-wracking (ok, spellcheck has tagged that and wants it to be nerve-racking. Which just looks so wrong. I'm not putting my nerves in a rack, like spices or guns.)
ANYWAY. There is all of this advice out there on how to prep for a viva: what to do x number of weeks and days ahead of time, how to dress, questions to consider and answer, etc. I printed off some of these lists and spent several hours answering random generic questions. Things like "What are the important implications/key findings of the work?"; and "What have been some of the main things you've learned as a result of carrying out this research?"; and my personal favorite, "What, if anything, would you do differently if you were to repeat the work?" I mean, how do you answer that last one? "Gee, I'd have made better life choices and not had to move half a dozen times in the past five years. I'd have written it all *better*. I'd have been less lazy." ???
Luckily, the examiners who, well, examine you for a PhD aren't company managers who depend on those books about how to conduct employee interviews. The examiners (you have an internal from your uni and an external from somewhere else but in a related field or with related research) are the only people who have--aside from your supervisors--read your dissertation at this point. What you get is to sit down for an hour or two and talk about what you've just spent a good chunk of years doing. You get to totally geek out about your research, which is a rather lot of fun!
My examiners asked me things like what I saw as the difference between children's and adult fantasy novels that use gardens as a main setting and why I think adult books don't use gardens the same way (why I think the "magic is gone" so to speak). They asked me about the metaphor of the garden, about the link between gardening and literary creation, about the structure of the novel and how it tied in with the magic in the novel, about the uncanny, and why a character in the 1941 section is the first (and only) to be written "in dialect" (I said because he was the first character who sounded like me in my head). Some questions did throw me a bit, but I learned more about the novel I wrote by being asked these unexpected questions than I could have anticipated.
A viva ends with you being told whether you have passed with minor corrections (the majority of the time this is the consensus), major corrections (this is not what anyone wants and means going back to the drawing board), or no corrections (which is rather rare). I got no corrections! Granted, I walked in with a 6-page list of the typos I had found, along with edits I made to clean some things up. And my examiners had a short list of some word choices (mostly linked to etymology) that I needed to look up (writing in UK English when you are American can be challenging!). But that was it: nothing to go back and overhaul.
At the end, the external examiner held out her hand and said, "Congratulations, Dr. Angus!" Having been so caught up in my anxiety over the whole thing, I'd forgotten that part--the Dr part--and was taken by surprise.
So that's it, the story of my viva. Now I just have to figure out what's next.
Sitting a viva is nerve-wracking (ok, spellcheck has tagged that and wants it to be nerve-racking. Which just looks so wrong. I'm not putting my nerves in a rack, like spices or guns.)
ANYWAY. There is all of this advice out there on how to prep for a viva: what to do x number of weeks and days ahead of time, how to dress, questions to consider and answer, etc. I printed off some of these lists and spent several hours answering random generic questions. Things like "What are the important implications/key findings of the work?"; and "What have been some of the main things you've learned as a result of carrying out this research?"; and my personal favorite, "What, if anything, would you do differently if you were to repeat the work?" I mean, how do you answer that last one? "Gee, I'd have made better life choices and not had to move half a dozen times in the past five years. I'd have written it all *better*. I'd have been less lazy." ???
Luckily, the examiners who, well, examine you for a PhD aren't company managers who depend on those books about how to conduct employee interviews. The examiners (you have an internal from your uni and an external from somewhere else but in a related field or with related research) are the only people who have--aside from your supervisors--read your dissertation at this point. What you get is to sit down for an hour or two and talk about what you've just spent a good chunk of years doing. You get to totally geek out about your research, which is a rather lot of fun!
My examiners asked me things like what I saw as the difference between children's and adult fantasy novels that use gardens as a main setting and why I think adult books don't use gardens the same way (why I think the "magic is gone" so to speak). They asked me about the metaphor of the garden, about the link between gardening and literary creation, about the structure of the novel and how it tied in with the magic in the novel, about the uncanny, and why a character in the 1941 section is the first (and only) to be written "in dialect" (I said because he was the first character who sounded like me in my head). Some questions did throw me a bit, but I learned more about the novel I wrote by being asked these unexpected questions than I could have anticipated.
A viva ends with you being told whether you have passed with minor corrections (the majority of the time this is the consensus), major corrections (this is not what anyone wants and means going back to the drawing board), or no corrections (which is rather rare). I got no corrections! Granted, I walked in with a 6-page list of the typos I had found, along with edits I made to clean some things up. And my examiners had a short list of some word choices (mostly linked to etymology) that I needed to look up (writing in UK English when you are American can be challenging!). But that was it: nothing to go back and overhaul.
At the end, the external examiner held out her hand and said, "Congratulations, Dr. Angus!" Having been so caught up in my anxiety over the whole thing, I'd forgotten that part--the Dr part--and was taken by surprise.
So that's it, the story of my viva. Now I just have to figure out what's next.
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