[academia] mild ongoing amusement

[kaberett]

One of the things I apparently Need To Prepare for my viva is a short (5-10 minute) overview of what I've done and why. The idea, as best I can tell, is that this (1) demonstrates that I am actually familiar with the content of my thesis and can summarise it, and (2) is intended to be a nice easy introduction to get me relaxed and talking.

I, meanwhile, am the kind of autistic who instantly freezes up over this, because!!! that's why I wrote the abstract!!! and the plain language summary!!! and the introduction!!! and the entire final chapter!!!!! Did I? do it wrong? is it Inadequate? what did I leave Out of the Writings that I need to Say? How In The Heck am I supposed to pitch this, given that it's to subject experts who have at least nominally READ the THESIS??? what! register! do! I! use!

... so anyway I'm going to be spending some of tomorrow outlining and rehearsing that again, probably, in the hopes of not having the "easy opening" trip me up catastrophically...

Comments

[flippac]

I'm still learning a whole bunch about scoping stuff myself.

I'd be taking some stuff to a blog post, but... luckily? for me, the obvious static site generator for me to use is currently causing versioning hell on my tablet and I don't want to commit to running the generator on my desktop just yet.

[ironed_orchid]

If it's meant to be less formal, I would pitch it as if you are talking to colleagues who are famillair with the work in question but need a referesher.

[kht]

Yes, and also (3) refreshes the memory of the examiners + reminds them of the points they want to cover. Same register as your summary/intro or slightly less formal should be fine, maybe with a favourite diagram or graph to point at.

My "easy opening" was not so easy - they asked me what I'd done and in what order. My sequence of research was somewhat non-linear, so I stumbled a bit.

[chiasmata]

OH GOD, the easy opener. I am with you on this!

[lunabee34]

*hugs*

You've got this, you are going to rock this, you know it.

*high five*

[highlyeccentric]

This was a different kind of tricky for me, because public viva = non-expert audience, but a kind of tricky that I enjoy.

Assuming people who have READ your thesis, I'd treat it as a recap of *things you expect people in your field to care about* - the whys, particularly. If they're ABOUT to grill you on why you did X and not Y, this gives you a chance to get your justification in first, and then they can pick up 'you said you did x because... but what about Thingy?' rather than just flatly demanding 'WHY DID YOU DO THAT PAL'. If you know of any really obvious gap, you can flag this here - 'q obviously needs addressing, but was out of the scope of a PhD project'. If anything's come out in your field since you submitted that you might be expected to consider, or is relevant in any way, you can flag - 'W, published after I submitted, has this to day' or even 'I haven't had a chance to dig into W yet, but it looks as if it will [be relevant in some way to this gap i had]'. In my case I had to flag what I planned to add or change for the book, because examiner feedback very much feeds toward that - I don't think that's relevant in your field, but if there's something comparable you KNOW you'll get examiner advice on (bits not yet turned into papers? future research?) you could take the chance to get ahead of them on that.