phd viva horror stories

• Share on twitter
• Share on facebook

Of monsters and mentors: PhD disasters, and how to avoid them

Despite all that’s been done to improve doctoral study, horror stories keep coming. here three students relate phd nightmares while two academics advise on how to ensure a successful supervision.

• Share on linkedin
• Share on mail

For all the efforts in recent years to improve the doctoral experience for students, Times Higher Education still receives a steady supply of horror stories from PhD candidates. To the authors of such submissions, the system appears, at best, indifferent to them and, at worst, outright exploitative. Here, we present three such examples – all of whose writers, tellingly, feel the need to remain anonymous, given the power dynamics involved.

Perhaps such tales are inevitable. Perhaps, even with the best will in the world, there will always be supervisor-supervisee relationships that just don’t function; expectations that, however heartfelt, just aren’t realistic; supervisors who just can’t find the time to give the kind of detailed supervision that they would like to give, and that students feel they need.

But perhaps there is still more that could be done to ensure that this most intense and crucial of academic relationships doesn’t end up on the rocks. In that spirit, two academics with strong views on the matter – one from science and one from the humanities – set out how they think the supervisory task should best be approached. Their guidance may not amount to a stake through the heart of the PhD horror franchise: as B-movie history amply demonstrates, good advice is not always heeded. But the exposure of the problems to further sunlight may at least slow the drip-drip of blood on to the doctoral carpet.

I had never felt so helpless in my life. The university wholly and blindly supported my supervisors, ignored my concerns and suggested, again, that I was making things up

When I was offered a fully funded doctorate in a UK environmental science laboratory, I was delighted and accepted instantly. I assumed that the experience of working in an international environment and the many transferable skills that I would learn would be a stepping stone to an exciting career beyond the academy. Little did I know that what I had signed up for would destroy not only my career plans but also my passion for the subject, my ambition and my self-confidence.

My supervisors turned out to have limited knowledge of the topic that they had so glamorously advertised, and the university lacked the facilities and machinery that I needed. Left with precious little guidance, I was obliged to work with methods that would do very little to enhance my career. An obvious solution was to set up an external collaboration, but my supervisors were reluctant to sanction it. They didn’t seem to want to share the glory with anyone else, but the environment that they created meant that there was never likely to be much glory to share anyway.

It didn’t help, either, that I am female. My male supervisors, in a male-dominated field, constantly made belittling remarks that they would never have made to a male student, remarks that led me to doubt my own capabilities. My doctorate became a living nightmare, and, after a year of ineffectively trying to solve the issues directly with my supervisors, I decided to take things further.

Because the head of my department had just resigned, I sought help from the university’s students’ union. But joint meetings with a union representative and my supervisors seemed to go nowhere, culminating in accusations that I was “making up” the issues. The union subsequently managed to arrange a meeting with the head of the graduate school, but, nearly six weeks after our meeting, he deemed my case too complex and I was ultimately told to solve my issues with my supervisors directly!

I had never felt so helpless in my life, and I was amazed at how unconcerned the university apparently was about student well-being. After months of more meetings with my supervisors and the union, I was contacted by the departmental postgraduate tutor, who expressed “concern” about my progress. This offered me a ray of hope. However, as usual, things got worse rather than better. The university wholly and blindly supported my supervisors, ignored my concerns and suggested, again, that I was making things up. I was offered an additional female supervisor, but, while welcome, that would have done little to solve the other issues.

I was given an ultimatum. I had two weeks to decide if I wanted to continue with my PhD and “accept” things as they were. The alternative was to leave – without any form of diploma or certificate for my two years of work (which included the publication of a first-author paper).

My last throw of the dice was to contact my funding body. However, my entire funding had already been transferred to my university, so there was little that it could do to help me. Thus I had no other choice but to quit and to watch as the university swept my case under the carpet, documenting my withdrawal as the result of “personal and health issues”.

Although the experience has cost me a lot, it also taught me a considerable amount. I learned to be wary of offers that seem too good to be true. I learned not to take my rights for granted. I learned the value of having expectations, commitments and offers put down in writing. I learned to trust no one.

I also learned a lot about how higher education institutions function. I discovered that they will do whatever it takes to cover up their own mishaps to save their reputation, even if it comes at the cost of destroying a young person’s career.

Anecdotally, cases similar to mine are becoming increasingly common. In recent months, there have been multiple ongoing cases at my former university, including more withdrawals. However, the university just recruits more students to make up for the losses.

It is well known that PhD students are widely seen by academics as a cheap workforce. But to be treated with such little respect by the people who are supposed to foster your career and help you to succeed is just not right in any workplace.

The author prefers to remain anonymous.

If you want to supervise and mentor with integrity and thoughtfulness, it is ultimately up to you to decide to do so, and to make the rules. You cannot assume good ethics on the part of your department

The power that you as a supervisor have over a student or postdoc is immense. Your actions, whether they are kindnesses, temper tantrums or intimacies, have the potential to shake up trainees to a much greater degree than their actions can affect you. And, most of the time, trainees have no way to solve conflicts with you if you won’t negotiate. Hence, it is your responsibility not to abuse your power.

But it takes integrity and clarity not to do so. Doctoral supervision is challenging. Your first difficulty is in acknowledging and getting beyond unrealistic expectations of your students that you might not even know you have. In science, new supervisors often imagine a lab filled with idealised workers: miniature versions of themselves, who churn out data and submit manuscripts. So when their charges don’t do exactly what they expect, they feel frustrated.

You might also observe that other supervisors allow their people to flounder, or even to fail. And even though you don’t want that, you have never had the lessons in personnel management that might ensure it doesn’t happen. Academic departments and institutions may or may not provide support to guide supervisors and students in building effective relationships.

If you want to supervise and mentor students with integrity and thoughtfulness, it is ultimately up to you to decide to do so, and to make the rules. You cannot assume good ethics on the part of your department. Nor can you assume, as a scientist, that your research group will passively absorb your good intentions. You must consider what you haven’t been trained in graduate school to consider: your own ethics, morals and sense of justice. Accept what institutional help exists, but if the policies at your institution render trainees expendable, you must develop the courage to stand up to power.

And then you build a framework for your students in which your ethics, rules and expectations are clear. For example, if you want your people to know that you are concerned with their professional futures, don’t let them drift without guidance. Evaluate each person regularly, and give feedback and compassionate criticism – not just on results but also on communication skills, presentation skills, time management and other characteristics of a successful professional. Keep notes on your meetings and follow up on what you and the trainee have discussed. Check in frequently and provide multiple opportunities for discussion and interaction. Be present.

Authorship and project choice are other vital areas where your policies can reflect your intentions to have a collaborative rather than a competitive climate. How are projects chosen? Do you actively foster collaboration, putting new people to work with more established lab members in a way that both parties benefit from, and will you continue to guide and monitor those collaborations? Do you intend to compete with your own trainees when they leave, or will you allow them to take their projects with them? Who writes the papers? How is authorship decided? Will you protect your people in authorship disputes with collaborating groups, or will you sacrifice a trainee to keep last authorship for yourself?

Create a group manual, with protocols, policy and helpful information, being specific about whatever you consider to be important for students to know. Include information about where trainees can find help if they have a personal or project issue – including problems with you.

You also need to be prepared to deal with the inevitable conflicts between lab members. Learn not to fear it, as that fear can mould you into a little dictator and keep you from understanding what people need. Have a process to work through conflicts (look up “interest-based conflict resolution”), as fair process often carries more weight with people even than achieving the outcome they wanted. Explain that process to your students, too: conflict resolution is one of the most valuable skills you can pass on. Don’t run from emotions – research is an emotional business – but learn to control your own emotional responses so that they don’t interfere with your communications.

Talk about ethical behaviour, and model that behaviour. If you expect your people to meet deadlines, you should be on time for meetings and return manuscripts and phone calls predictably. If you hear someone making a racist or sexist remark, correct the person: doing nothing will send the message that such behaviour is OK by you.

It is also important not to let yourself, or anyone else, become isolated. Make a point of introducing your students to your former students and postdocs – as well as to experts in their fields – when they visit or when you encounter them at meetings. Model the value of mentors by having mentors yourself, for personal and professional advice. Have the confidence to encourage trainees to have other role models and mentors, especially if they move into a project area in which you aren’t expert: having mentors is the start of building a web of relationships that will support trainees all through their lives.

But students must also be activists. Some supervisors eat their young, and some institutions allow it. As a student, you have the greatest level of control before you accept a position, so look for a place where you are respected and can do the work that you believe in. Ask other students questions about the scholarship and mentorship of particular supervisors before you make the decision to sign on. Once there, find role models, and get to know your community. The more you are integrated with others, the more people there are to help should your relationship with your supervisor or your project go badly.

It is unfortunate and unfair that students are not always protected, and that leaving might be the only solution to a toxic situation, but that is the harsh reality. So, as a student, doing all that you can to ensure that you will be appreciated and fulfilled in the position you accept is worth the effort.

Kathleen Barker is clinical assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Public Health. She is the author of At the Helm: Leading Your Laboratory (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press).

PhD students are often made to feel like they are a huge burden on their supervisors, and they are frequently ignored and unsupported

Tom sent his supervisor a chapter of his PhD thesis to read six weeks ago. He can’t start on the next chapter until he receives feedback on what he has already done. But he has had no response despite chasing up his supervisor – with whom he gets on well personally – several times. Indeed, he has not even received an acknowledgement of his email. And he knows that when he does finally receive a reply, there will be no mention of the delay, let alone an apology. He knows that because this has all happened before.

But this time the situation plays out even more egregiously. After Tom has waited for two more weeks, he finally hears back – a full two months after his initial email. But his supervisor has checked only the first two pages and the last page of his chapter, ignoring everything between.

Tom is frustrated, but he thanks his supervisor for the feedback and does not challenge her over the delay. How can he when he is entirely dependent on her to get him through the PhD submission process and to supply a good reference for subsequent job applications? Besides, sustaining a complaint would come down to his word against hers – and she is senior and well respected in the department and the university. No one would believe him. And even if they did, would it really be worth the hassle of getting another supervisor allocated to him in his final year – and, in the process, acquiring a bad reputation in the department for being the one who “made a fuss”?

So Tom soldiers on. Eventually, after much delay, he finishes his thesis. But is it ready for submission? He points out to his supervisor that he does not believe that the thesis has been checked properly, but she tells him to stop worrying, to take responsibility for his work and to be confident in its quality and in his ability to defend it. So he takes the plunge and submits. But he spends the next two months worrying that he might fail, rendering the past four years of hard work a complete waste of time.

This is a true story. And it takes only a few cursory searches of online PhD forums to see how common such scenarios are. PhD students are often made to feel like they are a huge burden on their supervisors, and they are frequently ignored and unsupported. Hence, even the most toxic student-supervisor relationships often persist long beyond the point of dysfunctionality, sometimes leaving the student with mental health problems.

I believe that this happens primarily because supervisors’ responsibilities are rarely clearly defined and because supervisors are not accountable to anyone for carrying them out. So I make the following recommendations:

• Training for supervisors must be compulsory
• Supervisors must be held accountable to someone senior in the department, and PhD students should be made aware of who that is
• Supervisors must be required to respond to their PhD students’ emails within three days, barring any type of leave
• Supervisors’ responsibilities need to be outlined clearly in a handbook that is available to both supervisors and students. It should also be made clear to students how much of their supervisors’ time each week or month is allocated to giving them feedback so that they are not made to feel like a burden
• Students must be assigned a mentor who is not close to their supervisor or in the same research team – ideally in another department altogether. This person can help to alleviate concerns and act as an intermediary when necessary
• There should be an anonymous procedure within each department that PhD students can use to complain or give feedback about their supervisor
• Supervisors should be formally encouraged to ask their students annually how they could better support them. This should be part of supervisors’ yearly appraisals.

In the absence of such steps, such stories as the one above will continue to write themselves over and over again.

If a relationship works well, it can be life-changing for the student and deeply rewarding for the supervisor. Supervising PhDs, I have been directed along paths that I would not have discovered otherwise

There is no doubt in my mind that the best part of being an academic over the years has been supervising PhD students. I cannot remember how many I have supervised, but the number runs to well over 80, and I have examined even more than that.

I am still in touch with many former students and examinees, and have been delighted to follow their careers wherever they are in the world. If a relationship between supervisor and postgraduate works well, it can be life-changing for the student and deeply rewarding for the supervisor. I have learned so much from supervising PhDs, and have been directed along new paths that I would not have discovered otherwise. There have been occasions when a student would arrive in my office with a bag full of books that he or she felt I should read: a living demonstration of the fact that it is not always the supervisor who provides all the bibliographical information.

I always start by telling students three things: that I will read every word they write in draft and then in final copy; that if they can get me to approve the thesis, given how tough I am going to be with them, then they have a very good chance of getting it past the examiners; and that they should not be discouraged if they find that their work is shifting direction after a few months. Writing a humanities PhD is an organic process, and if ideas have not started to develop by the end of the first year, then something is going wrong. Supervisors are particularly important at this stage, to provide reassurance and to help the student move forward.

Supervising PhDs is rewarding because you can see the process of intellectual development unfolding before your eyes. But it is also an intensely time-consuming task. All the various calculations of hourly allocation for supervision are absurd: if you are going to supervise properly, then you have to be prepared to spend hours reading drafts and then talking to the student.

There are some supervisors who do not write anything on drafts, preferring to correct only a final version. I find this ridiculously unhelpful. The whole point of reading drafts is to give proper feedback, and in the case of international students this kind of detailed reading is essential. Academic writing courses help, but careful editing by a supervisor is vital.

Nor should a supervisor’s detailed corrections focus on content alone. They also need to address spelling, punctuation, style and structure. Sometimes I have proposed radical structural changes, such as moving material from a conclusion into the introduction and vice versa. Such suggestions can be responsibly made only after you do a final read-through of the whole thesis – and that final reading is essential because although you may have read individual chapters or sections over several years, only the student will have a clear idea of how they want it to fit together.

It is also important to provide a written summary of general points after reading each draft. I learned early on that trying to do this verbally does not work because a student is often anxious and so does not take everything in. An email with bullet points works best. It is also important to balance criticism with praise, so the summary should start out with something positive before moving on to the “however” part. But all criticism, however negative, should be presented in such a way as to offer solutions and to help the student with the next stage in writing.

One of the problems facing supervisors in the UK is that the hours they put in are never adequately acknowledged by university management. This is because the UK has had to try to catch up with the kind of structure for doctorates that operates in US universities, and often PhD students have been tagged on as extras to someone’s academic workload. In the humanities, there have also been (and remain) some curious ideas about the need for a supervisor to be a “specialist” in exactly the same area as the student. Not only can this impose undue pressures on specialists in popular fields, it is also conceptually misconceived. Supervision should take both student and supervisor down relatively unexplored paths.

When it comes to choosing an examiner, practices vary widely. I have heard colleagues state firmly that the student should have no input, but I consult with mine because it is important to find out whether they have been in contact with any potential examiners. Also, despite clear guidelines, some universities still do not appoint anyone to chair the viva, which means that if a student feels hard done by, there is no independent witness. That only makes the choice of examiner even more important.

I don’t understand why supervising PhDs should be seen as a chore, rather than as a unique opportunity to engage with the brightest minds of younger generations. My research would be so much poorer without the help that I have received, directly and indirectly, from my doctoral students.

Susan Bassnett is professor of comparative literature at the universities of Warwick and Glasgow.

The degree was not awarded. Yet years later I discovered evidence that the viva had been deliberately biased. It’s a serious matter – so how would the university respond?

Some students cheat. That’s clear from numerous articles in the press. But is this a one-sided view? How often is the examiner’s performance questioned or subjected to independent scrutiny? For postgraduates in particular, this is no trivial matter: any bias or lack of honesty in an examiner can waste years of the candidate’s life and can degrade trust in the system.

My experience may not be typical, but it’s certainly an eye-opener for any postgraduate who assumes that the viva examination will be automatically fair and above board.

After an MSc, I completed four years of doctoral research at a major UK university. The results were formally approved by the relevant research council and were published as a series of seven papers in major, peer-reviewed journals.

Before the viva, I’d queried the choice of examiners, owing to perceived bias, but was overruled.

The degree was not awarded: the examiners claimed that none of my seven papers had deserved publication – even though they had satisfied a total of 14 independent referees. The examiners had decided all 14 were wrong.

So what did I do? I got on with my life. Years later, though, I discovered that my papers are cited in the examiners’ own publications: that is, the examiners had used them as valid references to support their own work. Incredibly, some of these papers had been referenced before my viva. Clearly, this was perverse, dishonest and highly unprofessional conduct: the viva had been deliberately biased. It’s a serious matter – so how would the university respond?

I sent it five of the examiners’ publications that cite my papers, together with a copy of the examiners’ signed report. I asked for acknowledgement that the viva had been biased. But the university declined to comment; it said the complaint was “out of time”.

Where there is evidence of malpractice, it should not matter when the viva was held: bias was deliberate and obvious, and the university could have followed up. Hiding behind process is a deeply inadequate response to such a blatant and egregious case. Nowadays, so-called historic cases of injustice and abuse, some from many decades ago, are being recognised and investigated. So why is corruption in education treated differently?

Examinations might be more equitable if, before the viva, candidates were officially entitled to raise concerns about their examiners – any concerns being addressed independently of the college or university. Such adjudication might seldom be needed, but it should still be in place. Examiners, after all, are people. And people – from students to presidents – do not always possess the levels of integrity and honesty that we naively expect of them.

Candidates should not be expected to accept a particular examiner if they can offer valid reasons for not doing so. And any university that seeks to impose a disputed examiner should be asked to reconsider its definition of fair play. 

Register to continue

Why register?

• Registration is free and only takes a moment
• Once registered, you can read 3 articles a month
• Sign up for our newsletter

Or subscribe for unlimited access to:

• Unlimited access to news, views, insights & reviews
• Digital editions
• Digital access to THE’s university and college rankings analysis

Already registered or a current subscriber? Login

Related articles

PhDs: ‘toxic’ supervisors and ‘students from hell’

How should universities handle breakdowns in PhD student-supervisor relationships?

Reader's comments (11)

You might also like.

What’s next for Bangladesh’s divisive student politics?

Student-led downfall of autocratic leader has catalysed national conversation about the place of politics on university campuses typically beset by violence 

Ex-president’s novel explores college sports tensions

Thomas Ehrlich based latest book on run-ins with legendary Indiana basketball coach Bob Knight

A good student experience is not just about fulfilled expectations

The OfS’ approach is evolving, partly reflecting the fact that a course’s long-term value is not always immediately obvious, says John Blake

Average master’s fee higher than postgraduate loan for first time

While value of government-backed loan has increased by 21 per cent since 2017-18, average fees have soared by 43 per cent

Featured jobs

The Savvy Scientist

Experiences of a London PhD student and beyond

How to Defend a Thesis: An Introduction to the PhD Viva

The prospect of defending your PhD work can be more than a little daunting. It represents the climax of many years of hard work, you’ll have to defend a thesis in front of experts in your field and the whole PhD viva process can seem cloaked in mystery.

Maybe you’ve seen a labmate go for their PhD viva to then emerge several hours later, relieved but perhaps slightly dazed. Often it’ll be the case that they’ll have forgotten the specifics by the time they’ve left the room. On top of that, horror stories of bad PhD viva experiences pass through many research groups which are enough to make even the most confident and positive PhD students shake in their boots.

Having had my own PhD viva earlier this year, in addition to discussing experiences with many other PhD graduates, I now want to help you through the process.

Before we begin, I want to offer some reassurance. For most people the PhD viva is not at all the horrible experience we occasionally hear about. Even so, it’s still useful to know what to expect. I’ve therefore put together a series to help others understand the PhD viva process and how to defend a thesis.

Defend a Thesis: Overview of the PhD Viva Series

This first post will be an introduction to the PhD viva process and how to defend a thesis. Upcoming posts will cover:

• Viva Preparation: Common PhD Viva Questions
• What is a PhD Viva Like? Sharing Graduates’ Experiences
• How to Choose Your Examiners

If there is anything specific you’d like covered, please let me know! I’ll be sure to include it. If you’d like to subscribe to get notified of upcoming posts as they’re released you can do so here:

How is a PhD Assessed?

Typically the main output expected at the end of your PhD project is a thesis. You’ve put years of work into your PhD and the thesis details your contributions to your chosen research field. But how is the thesis “marked”? Who will decide if what you’ve written is actually any good?

This is where the PhD viva comes in!

The PhD viva involves you discussing and defending your work with experts in your field. The experts act as examiners to determine whether or not the university should award you a PhD based on your thesis and viva performance. The thesis is the written report submitted for a PhD, and the viva is a means of quality control to ensure that only suitable candidates are awarded a PhD by the university.

Although part of the purpose of a PhD viva is to ensure that the work is of a high quality, just as importantly it’s to check that you were the one who carried it out and that you understand what you were doing!

The PhD viva is therefore essentially an exam during which you’ll have to defend a thesis.

Here is the official “mark scheme” for a PhD at Imperial:

I recommend looking at the presentation which this screenshot came from: sadly I only came across it after my own PhD viva whilst putting together this post!

Steps to Completing a PhD

• Submit your thesis for the examiners to read ahead of the viva.
• Have the viva , where you’ll defend a thesis and discuss your research. The examiners will decide from a list of possible outcomes as detailed later in this post.
• Make amendments to the thesis as necessary.
• Optional celebration.
• Have the thesis amendments approved by the examiners and/or your supervisor and confirmation sent to the university.
• Upload the final copy of your thesis to the university.
• Eagerly await notification that you’ve been awarded a PhD by the university!
• Celebrate, Dr!

All celebrations except for the one after making changes to your thesis are mandatory!

PhD Viva vs PhD Defence

The words viva and defence are sometimes used interchangeably, but often are used to reference the different ways that the a PhD is concluded around the world.

A PhD viva (technically a viva voce ) is a formal examination of a PhD. It’s typical in the UK (amongst other countries) and it is a closed-event between yourself and some examiners.

Across much of Europe it is common instead to have a PhD defence . This still involves expert questioning but can be more of a ceremony and may even be open to the public. You can read about Siddartha’s experience , who completed his PhD in the Netherlands.

I went through a PhD viva and that’ll be the focus of this series. Nevertheless, there is overlap and you may still have difficult questions in a PhD defence, so the content in this series should still be useful no matter where you’re based.

In both a PhD viva and a PhD defence you’ll be expected to defend a thesis which represents the culmination of your work during the PhD.

Who is Present During the PhD Viva?

In the UK it is typical for the PhD viva to include:

• One or more experts from your university ( internal examiner ).
• One or more experts in your field from another institution to your own ( external examiner ).
• And sometimes your supervisor, though in my experience this is quite rare unless you actively ask them to be there.

The main role of the internal examiner is to act as a moderator and ensure that the university’s protocols are upheld. They’ll usually still have some questions for you, but on top of that they’ll make sure that the external examiner(s) are reasonable. They will also take charge of documenting the viva.

Often the external examiner will be more specialised to your field than the internal examiner, so expect them to potentially ask more tricky and technical questions.

As mentioned in the previous section, for PhD defences in other countries the event may be less of an exam (viva) and more of a celebration of your work. These can be a lot more open, with access granted to your friends, family or anyone else who is interested in the topic. I quite like this idea, especially when the research has been publicly funded!

How the PhD Viva is Structured

The structure of the viva will vary but a typical format is shown below. The times in brackets are how long the sections for my own viva were, thankfully not all vivas are over five hours long!

• Introductions (2 minutes) – greeting the examiners and they’ll usually quickly give an overview for how they want the viva to go.
• Presentation (10 minutes) – Not all examiners will want you to give a presentation, it’s best to ask them in advance. I believe many examiners like asking for presentations: both to ease into the exam and also to see how you do at distilling years of work into a short presentation.
• Discussion (Over 5 hours, yes, really!) – the long and potentially scary bit.
• A short break (~10 minutes) . You’ll leave the room (or video call!) and the examiners will come to a decision for your PhD outcome.
• Decision and final comments (10 minutes) – where the examiners will tell you what the outcome is of the viva – we’ll cover this in more depth in the next section.

The discussion in the middle of course is the main guts of the PhD viva, and the potentially scary bit. This is where you’ll get questioned about your work and thesis. What you get asked could vary considerably depending on your thesis and examiners.

I’ll save an in-depth discussion of my own viva for another post. In short, I received very few questions relating to the work or any fundamental underlying science. There were practically no questions to quiz my knowledge.

Rather than checking my understanding of the work, the viva was much more of a discussion of how best to present the work in the thesis. We spent roughly an hour going page by page through each chapter. This included suggestions for improvements to figures, changes in terminology and the like.

Possible PhD Viva Outcomes

At the end of the viva the examiners will give you feedback. This will include feedback on your performance in the viva. But as long as they’re satisfied that you carried out the work and that you knew what you’re doing, the bulk of the feedback will in fact revolve around your PhD thesis.

Technically there are lots of potential outcomes, as detailed here:

In reality here are the four main possible outcomes from the viva:

• Pass with no amendments . The examiners didn’t want to make a single alteration to your thesis. Well done you just have to submit the finalised thesis to the university and you’ve finished your PhD! I know a few people who’ve had no revisions but it’s rare.
• Pass with minor amendments Minor amendments include things such as correcting typos, rewording sentences and small alterations to data analysis and presentation. This is by far the most common outcome.
• Referral for resubmission ( major amendments). More substantial changes to the thesis are required or further experimental work is required to fulfil the requirements of a PhD. The examiners will decide whether or not this means having another viva too.
• Fail . Unless there are glaring issues or you didn’t actually do any of the research in your thesis yourself, you should be relieved to hear that practically no one ever fails. If you have failed, it usually points to systematic issues revolving around your supervisor: you shouldn’t have been allowed to get to this point. Usually the examiners would recommend that you be awarded a lower degree, such as a masters in research (MRes).

Slightly up the page is a screenshot from my own examiners’ report. You’ll see that I, like most people, passed with minor amendments.

2022 Update: Starting to prepare for your PhD viva? A set of viva preparation worksheets are now available in the resource library. Click the image below for free access!

Making Changes to Your PhD Thesis

Shortly after the viva you should receive the examiner’s report which includes a list of revisions for you to make.

If you’ve got through the viva with a pass, you can breathe a sigh of relief because the hard work is over! In a separate post I’ll be covering how the process to make my own minor amendments went.

No matter the outcome, it is possible that you’d like to make your own changes to the thesis since it’ll have been many weeks (or months) since submitting the draft copy for your viva. On reflection there may be things you’re not happy with. You are welcome to make changes to the document yourself.

If you’re interested in reading more about how to make the corrections to your thesis, read the article dedicated to it here: Minor Corrections: How To Make Them and Succeed With Your PhD Thesis.

After you’ve made changes, the final stage in getting awarded the PhD is submitting your finalised version of the thesis to the university. Shortly afterwards you’ll get the long-awaited notification that you’ve got your PhD!

Should You Strive For No Amendments?

In my opinion it’s not worth the effort of trying to get no amendments.

I’d personally rather spend slightly less time up front, knowing that more than likely I would have to made some amendments. You can never put in enough work to ensure there will be nothing your examiners want changed!

You could spent hundreds of extra hours endlessly going through your thesis meticulously before submission but your examiners can always find something they want you to change. In comparison, my own minor amendments only took two days of work.

Sometimes you’ll see someone mention on their CV that they passed with no revisions but it doesn’t really have any bearing on your PhD. Unlike most other qualifications, there aren’t really grades for PhDs: you either have one or you don’t.

During an early PhD assessment my assessor made a poignant joke about medical degrees: “What do you call the person who graduates bottom of their class in medical school? A doctor!” And it’s essentially the same with PhDs!

If you’d like personalised help with preparing for your PhD viva I am now starting to offer a small number of one-to-one sessions. Please contact me to find out more or click here to book a call.

I hope this introduction to PhD vivas and how to defend a thesis has been useful. Let me know if you have any specific questions or concerns you’d like to see addressed in the following posts.

As always you can stay up to date with content by subscribing here:

Share this:

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

Related Posts

The Five Most Powerful Lessons I Learned During My PhD

8th August 2024 8th August 2024

Minor Corrections: How To Make Them and Succeed With Your PhD Thesis

2nd June 2024 2nd June 2024

How to Master Data Management in Research

25th April 2024 4th August 2024

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

Privacy Overview

Fuse open science blog

• Who we are & how to take part

Thursday 23 May 2013

The phd viva: a thing of nightmares some reflections from a recently viva-ed phd student.

No comments:

Post a comment.

And then he threatened to kill himself: nightmare viva stories as opportunities for learning

Qualitative Research Journal

ISSN : 1443-9883

Article publication date: 13 November 2017

In the UK and countries following similar systems of doctoral assessment, there is little research-based evidence about what goes on in vivas. However, “doctoral assessment ‘horror stories’”, abound. The purpose of this paper is to report a study focussing on difficult doctoral examining experiences and argue that sharing such stories can provide a useful basis for examiner and supervisor education.

Design/methodology/approach

The study took a narrative auto/biographical approach.

The stories participants told show that doctoral examining is relational, emotional and ethical work and that viva outcomes are strongly influenced by subjectivities. There was felt to be a need to share stories of difficulties in order to bring them into the open with a view to prompting transformational change.

Research limitations/implications

Participants were self-selecting and all worked at the same institution.

Originality/value

There are few accounts of examiners’ experiences of the viva.

• Auto/biographical research
• Doctoral assessment
• Emotional relational work
• Ethical practice

Sikes, P. (2017), "And then he threatened to kill himself: nightmare viva stories as opportunities for learning", Qualitative Research Journal , Vol. 17 No. 4, pp. 230-242. https://doi.org/10.1108/QRJ-12-2016-0074

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2017, Pat Sikes

Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial & non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

Introduction

It does not take much to get us started. Bring a group of academics together, raise the topic of vivas, then sit back and wait for the “doctoral assessment ‘horror stories’” ( Morley et al. , 2013 , p. 5) to emerge. Most of us have tales to share, stories about our own or our students’ vivas, disturbing experiences as examiners and supervisors, or accounts of what happened to friends and colleagues. In the way of such things, each recounting accrues its own Chinese whispers embellishments, becoming ever more lurid. These are academic versions of urban myths, the anecdotes that “research examining seems to attract […] like a magnet” ( Grabbe, 2003 , p. 128), and as the worldwide expansion and diversification of doctoral studies ( Crossouard, 2011 ; Group of 8, 2013 ; Morley et al. , 2002, 2013 ; Tinkler and Jackson, 2004 ; Wisker and Kiley, 2014 ) leads to a concomitant increase in vivas, defences and other forms of examination [1] the genre grows daily.

Yet although the stories abound, in the UK and countries following similar systems of doctoral assessment, there is little research-based evidence about what happens in vivas. This is largely because the behind closed doors approach, involving the candidate, two or three examiners, maybe a chairperson, with the supervisor silently sitting in, has not been conducive to systematic data collection ( Morley et al. , 2013 ; Murray, 2009 , p. 13). The viva involves what Carter describes as “a Hogwartsian sense that it is an arcane ritual, a mystery and properly so” (2008, p. 365). Vivas can be seen, and operate, as rites of passage (cf. van Gennep, 1909/1961 ); and researching, let alone understanding, such life events is seldom easy. Matters are not helped either, at least within the UK, by the absence of transparency that seems to characterize doctoral assessment; by differences in examining procedures varying from institution to institution and discipline to discipline; and, by an apparent lack of education and advice for examiners ( Bassnett, 2014 ; Morley et al. , 2002, 2013 ; Murray, 2009 ; Park, 2003 ; Tinkler and Jackson, 2004 ).

Given what can be at stake for candidates (including career, income, identity), it is unsurprising that research on doctoral assessment has tended to focus on student experiences and outcomes with any consideration of how things are for examiners being very much secondary. However, as Pearce (2005) notes, “being asked to examine a doctoral thesis is not only one of the greatest honours you can be afforded as an academic, it is also one of the greatest responsibilities” (p. 1) with examiners feeling “under pressure since so much rests on how they manage the whole examination process” ( Murray, 2009 , pp. 2-3). Such responsibility would seem to warrant attention.

Research focussing on examiners’ perceptions and experiences has tended to be concerned with such issues as: assessment of what constitutes “doctorateness” (e.g. Trafford and Leshem, 2009 ; Poole, 2014 ; Wellington, 2013 ); views on the purpose of the viva ( Carter, 2008 ; Carter and Whittaker, 2009 ; Jackson and Tinkler, 2001 ); the sorts of questions asked in vivas ( Trafford and Leshem, 2002 ; Trafford, 2003 ); how examiners approach and read theses ( Carter, 2008 ; Golding et al. , 2014 ; Johnson, 1997 ; Mullins and Kiley, 2002 ); choice of examiners ( Kiley, 2009 ); notions of what constitutes originality ( Clarke and Lunt, 2014 ); and comparisons of consistency of grading ( Bloxham and Price, 2015 ; Bourke and Holbrook, 2013 ). This is useful information but it can fail to communicate much sense of what it is actually like to be an examiner taking part in “a social practice […] fraught with risks and uncertainties” ( Morley, 2004 , p. 91).

As someone who at the time of writing has sat mutely in the vivas of most of the 45 doctoral students I have supervised to completion, been external examiner for 91 doctorates, internal for around 40 more, and had my own viva, I know what it has been like for me. Obviously each time is different but I do not think I have ever been in a viva when anyone in the room has treated the situation lightly. I have been fortunate that in the majority of cases when I have been involved, as examiner or supervisor, events have proceeded relatively smoothly from appointment of examiners to the final outcome. There have, however, been a number of occasions, when issues and difficulties of various kinds – “horrors” even – have arisen and it was after one particularly disturbing viva that I felt the need to exploit the researcher’s privilege to investigate other’s experiences. I wanted to do this partly in order to put what happened into context ( Golding et al. , 2014 ) but more especially, to take the opportunity to follow Mills’ (1970) exhortation to use the sociological imagination in such a way that “the personal uneasiness of individuals is focussed upon explicit troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues” (pp. 11-12). I thought there could be something to learn from consideration and sharing of difficult stories that could make a contribution to the awareness of examiners and might help inform examining development and practice. This would seem to be a worthwhile enterprise since with notable exceptions such as Wakeford’s (UK based) PhD Diaries [2] , there appears to be little available to guide new examiners ( Gibney, 2013 ), other than the raw, unanalysed horror stories, instructive as these can undoubtedly be.

Examiners do, of course, draw on their own vivas for guidance and, in the same way that personal experience of being taught is a major influence on how teachers teach ( Day et al. , 2007 ; Golding et al. , 2014 ), it seems that one’s own experience of being examined is likely to influence one’s assessment practices ( Colley and Silver, 2005 ; Crossouard, 2011 , p. 324; Wisker and Kiley, 2014 , p. 127). Anecdotal evidence suggests that examiners often reproduce, adapt or avoid what happened to them as doctoral candidates. Only as they gain experience of examining, through a “sitting next to Nellie” [3] process can they begin to adopt a critical perspective, see other possibilities and develop other ways of doing it. A study might help some shortcut this process and consequently I decided to undertake an exploratory investigation of doctoral examiners’ experiences of examining.

An exploratory investigation of experiences of doctoral examining

Having obtained ethical clearance I sent out an e-mail to all academics working in a Russell Group [4] university inviting them to share their experiences of “difficulties or problems of whatever kind (e.g. practical, ethical, procedural) arising at any stage of the examination process, from the initial approach to be an examiner, through reading the thesis and taking part in the viva, to signing off and beyond”.

In total, 21 people at all career stages, from across the range of disciplines, responded, and between them, told 61 stories. In total, 20 people took part in audio-recorded interviews and one person contributed a written account.

As noted, I was motivated to undertake this investigation following an extremely nasty examining experience. My view, shared with Stanley (1992, 1993) , is that any study that involves making sense of and writing lives inevitably auto/biographically implicates the researcher. In this case, I treated my own examining experiences as “data”, thereby incorporating an unambiguously autoethnographic approach (see Ellis and Bochner, 2000 ; Golding et al. , 2014 ).

Seeking and studying stories

Obviously those who replied to the e-mail were self-selecting individuals who felt sufficiently motivated to take the time necessary to be involved. The reasons they wanted to be heard, as well as the ways in which they told their stories, the storylines, tropes, discourses, constructions, etc. they used, could all form the focus of different types of narrative research (see, e.g. Bochner and Riggs, 2014 ; Clandinin, 2013 ; Frank, 1995, 2010 ; Goodson, 2013 ; Reissmann, 2008 ). My aim here, however, is to re-present and consider what Goodson, borrowing from Stenhouse (1975) , describes as “stories of action within theories of context” ( Goodson, 1992 , p. 6). My interest is in the events and interpretations depicted in the stories, and in the connections, coherence, sense and meanings (cf. Polkinghorne, 1988 , p. 6) that academics make, impute or leave unsaid when constructing narratives to describe examining situations experienced as problematic. In seeking stories I have aspired to practice the sort of ethical, respectful and careful listening that Davies (2014) describes as expressing “openness to emergent difference in the other and in oneself, and openness to the not-yet-known […] [and] for that which cannot yet be said” (p. xii). Thus, I see the stories, their telling in a research context and my co-productive involvement in that process as potentially offering insights into and contributing to, the complex and ever evolving relationships and differences between social, structural and cultural locations and the identities and agency that tellers and hearers accord themselves.

I began by talking about “doctoral assessment horror stories”, suggesting they were not dissimilar to urban myths, prone to exaggeration and distortion, yet here I was, seeking stories of difficulties and problems that I was going to treat as “data”. Is there a difference in stories told amongst friends and those invited by a “researcher”? Possibly, much depends on how the various parties come to, and make sense of, research encounters and relationships.

When I saw your email I really wanted to speak to you cus we’re so often cast as the villains in the piece, the demon examiners. There are demon examiners but there are demon candidates and demon supervisors and dreadful situations as well and that needs documenting (Sara [5] ).

How do you learn to do it? On the job by and large but I do think we should be looking to educate examiners better and collecting and examining stories as you’re doing might provide materials that could be used in staff development work (Simon).

Each story is, of course, singular and personal, although it would seem that we all use the shared, culturally located storylines and scripts available to us (cf. Booker, 2006 ; Downs, 2013 ; Frank, 1995 ). Consequently any sort of categorisation inevitably does violence to the unique nature of the perceptions and experiences a narrator re-presents (cf. Bergin and Westwood, 2003 ; Bochner, 2014 ; Henry, 1965 ; Lather, 1991 ; Redwood, 2008 ). However, to provide a framework for comprehension and re-presentation, I am going to make use of some very broad headings that I considered were grounded in those stories. Thus, this is unequivocally my narrative account/analysis which undoubtedly reflects my own (auto/biographical) preoccupations and experiences.

examiners behaving badly;

supervisory issues;

thesis issues;

problems at home – issues around internal examining; and

student issues.

I will now address each in turn, using illustrative quotations.

Examiners behaving badly

Stories of examiners behaving badly included accounts of animosity and disagreements, sometimes stretching back years, between the various parties involved in, or even tangentially connected with, a viva. In these cases, grievances were taken out on candidates and it was only later that others learned what had possibly been going on.

I’ve encountered examiners who are incredibly pompous and who ramble on and on about their work and opinions without really asking the student any questions or giving the other examiner a chance to speak either (John).

So she’s going ‘why haven’t you cited my 2001 papers and my 2009 book? I don’t see how you thought you could avoid mentioning what I say there’. Sometimes work is so important that it has to appear but that wasn’t the case here […] but she insisted that there be amendments that included copious references to her stuff (Karla).

I had this experience where a student had, legitimately, critiqued the work of the external and I could see him getting redder and redder until he was practically incandescent with rage (Mick).

Some examiners seem to want the student to have written quite a different thesis and appear not to be prepared to acknowledge the one in front of them. When this happens the viva can become extremely frustrating with lines of questioning unconnected to the work that has been done.

He was really nasty. I think he was showing off, and when she cried he seemed to realise he’d gone too far and he didn’t know what to do so he sort of carried on but in a muted sort of fashion. He did send a letter of apology later that day – as if that was gonna make things better (Kate).

He wiped the floor with him. I kept trying to intervene but he was like a Rottweiler, wouldn’t let up and was getting louder and more agitated. There wasn’t space for the student to get a word in edgeways even if he’d not been rendered speechless by this onslaught (Brian).

John, Mark and Kate speculated whether aggressive examiners they had encountered were influenced by gendered approaches to doctoral assessment in particular and academic culture in general, linking bad behaviour to macho, confrontational styles of questioning (cf. Crossouard, 2011 ; Leonard, 2001 ). It certainly was the case that the badly behaved examiners I was told about were men, with the exception of the woman Karla referred to who could be seen to be self-promoting in a way that is usually associated with masculinity. Here, however, is not the place for further discussion of these issues.

Supervisory issues

It’s not unusual to get theses where you wonder what the supervisor has been up to. Why haven’t they intervened or why did they let the student submit. To be fair, you sometimes find out that the student has gone against advice but it can make for a very uncomfortable experience (Conrad).

Supervisory issues were often at the root of difficult examining experiences. There were stories of what seemed to be dereliction of duty where supervisors did not appear to have appropriately advised students or had not read their work, thereby allowing submission of seriously flawed pieces. Then there were cases where students had taken approaches which examiners critiqued before learning that the supervisor was responsible. Finding this out in a viva can, as Conrad noted, make for a very uncomfortable experience, especially when the examiner is a friend of the supervisor and they have been asked to examine as a favour.

This thesis was appallingly presented. There were grammatical and punctuation errors on every page and I may be a bit anal but I always have to correct everything so I was at it for ever. The student was Libyan but that cuts no mustard with me: you do a doctorate in a foreign language, you should have no concessions to your ability to express yourself in that language otherwise it raises issues with equality and fairness in relation to home students. I also think it’s disrespectful of my time to expect me to read such crap. The supervisor however, breezily said she didn’t think it was her job – the student should have employed a proof reader (Karen).

This was an absolutely dreadful experience which I don’t much like talking about because I’m not sure I did the right thing. And I can’t understand the supervisor’s role in it at all. This was an autoethnography which contained libellous comments about identifiable people and reported an extremely serious crime which apparently the police didn’t know about. There’d been no ethical review because the institution didn’t require it for auto/biographical work. The internal examiner and I were utterly appalled: I felt sorry for him because he had to deal with the departmental flak that followed, and we discussed going to the police and not going ahead with the viva but we did and it was a nightmare because there, from what the student said, it became crystal clear that this was a revenge text. I actually thought the student was psychopathic because they didn’t acknowledge anything was unacceptable, said they no longer had any relationship with the people written about and dismissed the crime as having happened a long time ago. I have to say it was extremely well written and a compelling read. We debated for ages and eventually decided we couldn’t pass it on ethical grounds and referred it to the head of department. The supervisor was out of the country when the viva happened – but they hadn’t raised any concerns with the student and had let them go ahead and submit: that much we ascertained (Sylvia).

[…] who took a long time to ask questions. The supervisor kept butting in and saying “what she means to say is […]” we threw him out after 5 mins (Myles).

The supervisor was pissed. He came into the room reeking of Listerine and I and the external who knew him of old, looked at each other. We both had a notion there might be trouble and it was only about 10 minutes into the viva that he intervened with a pompous comment about a question I’d asked. The external, who was a very senior academic, told him if he spoke again he’d have to go. He lasted about 5 minutes before he did it again so the external apologised to the student and told the supervisor to leave. After the viva we found out he’d left the building. Probably gone to the pub (Petra).

Theses issues

I had the experience of examining a thesis which substantially plagiarised me! And that was a home student, in the days before Google. I did go to the viva, although maybe I shouldn’t have, and when I challenged them they denied it – so I pulled my book out my bag and they still denied it and tried to argue it was a case of synchronicity (Paul).

I’d been asked to examine this thesis as a favour to a friend who’d taken on the student when the original supervisor had suddenly died. He told me it was complicated but didn’t want to go into detail for fear of influencing me – or putting me off as I now realise. The thesis came in two volumes with around 250,000 words. I checked and the regs said “doctoral theses will normally be of 80,000 words”. I contacted the internal and he said a special case had been made because the first examiners had said it could go over. First examiners? Didn’t I know this was a resubmission and that the student had demanded new examiners? No I didn’t – so could I see the original report? No I couldn’t because someone in the office had erroneously granted the student’s request that the new examiners didn’t see the first feedback because they felt it was prejudicial but now all this was on paper and apparently couldn’t be rescinded. The thesis made claims to use unique approaches to re-presentation. I’ve no problem with this sort of thing if it works but when my 22 year old son picked it up and said “what the f*** is this?” I couldn’t answer. It was a total mess: incoherent, unethical, bloody nonsense actually. I phoned the internal and said I didn’t want to go to viva because it was going to be embarrassing and he enquired as to whether we could fail it outright and the answer came back, no. There’d been so much trouble already and procedures hadn’t been properly followed so the very prestigious university was afraid of litigation and there had to be a viva. I felt like a sacrificial victim and debated not turning up but decided that was cowardly. The viva was every bit as dreadful as I’d imagined: the student – a mature candidate – was utterly bonkers. The only redeeming thing was the brilliant chair from another school who’d got a real grasp of the regs. Apparently we couldn’t fail it outright here either. Our discussion went on for ages and we were getting into hysterical laughter. Eventually we went for major amendments. It’s not come back yet (Annie).

Problems at home – issues around internal examining

It was major amendments. No question. But the supervisor was fuming. Immediately the external left she came to my room and gave me a bollocking, questioning my academic judgement and accusing me of letting the university down. This was 3 years ago and I’m still not forgiven. She treats me like shit now and as soon as I can I will leave. What I didn’t know at the time was that there were further complications in that the student was in a relationship with a friend of the supervisor and that she’d told her that all would be well (Sara).

This was the examination of the thesis of a female staff member so there were 2 externals and me. All men. We all agreed that the work was extremely poor in content and presentation. One external wanted an outright fail but because I was internal and because this was a colleague, I argued for major amendments and another viva. The supervisor wasn’t happy and nor was the candidate and unpleasant and libellous claims were made about the conduct of the viva. When we were giving the feedback the supervisor intervened in an inappropriate fashion and had to be told to shut up basically. The candidate said the questioning was aggressive and she also asked for an examining team which was not all male or misogynistic which is what she claimed we were. I don’t consider that was an appropriate claim but it was her perception and so for the next viva I had to get a female chair and I had to replace an examiner which was quite embarrassing. Came the resubmission and the work wasn’t much better and there were still egregious presentational problems. The decision was taken, nonetheless, to award an MPhil rather than the doctorate. Again the supervisor intervened and there was another major complaint – this time too there were complaints that the required changes were not sufficiently detailed. Eventually they agreed to allow another resubmission and the case is still in abeyance. Because this was an internal candidate and because the supervisor took the line they did, relationships within the school are seriously damaged. I actually feel particularly distressed because in my eyes I’ve been vilified and some appalling things have been said about me. The whole business has been entirely upsetting and stressful (Tom).

Student issues

I was asked to examine this thesis because the student had made a lot of use of my work. I read it and was astounded. There were no more than 30 references and the most recent one was 8 years old. Not only that, I was credited with having researched something I’ve never, ever looked at. I met the internal for lunch and she was unhappy too and she knew the student was difficult. The supervisor had left under a cloud a couple of years previously but had continued to supervise. Anyway the internal suggested we got a chair, it wasn’t normal practice there, and luckily there was a professor prepared to step in at short notice. Thank God we did because it was a viva from hell. The student, a relatively young woman, was the most aggressive candidate I’ve ever encountered. From the get go she was challenging and she made it clear she thought we were ivory tower idiots who knew f all about the real world of schools. When I asked her why she said I’d researched something I’ve never looked at she got even more aggressive and started quoting made up references to the extent that I began to wonder if I had. It was bizarre and it was nasty. We gave her major revisions. A couple of weeks later I got a demand to send up all my correspondence about the thesis with the internal. Freedom of information. There hadn’t been anything compromising but that’s what they were looking for, something like us saying something disrespectful or something. The internal said she thought the supervisor was behind it. Anyway, we were both sacked as examiners. Ignominious or what? (Ian).

It was awful. The supervisor knew the thesis was dreadful but the student had insisted on submitting. I don’t think he’d properly prepared her for major amendments or even possibly fail. And we recommended the former to be kind really. When she was told it was major she didn’t understand and she looked at her supervisor and asked if she’d passed. I said she had the opportunity to resubmit. It took a while for that to sink in and then she started crying, calling on God and saying she was going to die (Vena).

He was very upset there was a lot of shouting and then he threatened to kill himself (Valerie).

It was the first time I’d examined about 25 plus years ago. It was the Friday before the viva on the Monday. I was working late and the only person in the building. There was a knock at the door and there was this big bloke who told me I was to be his examiner on Monday. He came straight into the room and sat down and told me he had to pass because he was very senior in his country’s ministry of education, he’d been away from his family for 3 years and he needed to go home. He told me that it would be to my advantage to make things easy for him and that money and all expenses paid trips as a guest of his government could be mine. He asked me what I thought of his thesis and I said I wouldn’t talk about it outside the viva and would he leave now please. He went but as he left he told me to remember what he’d said. I was frightened. When I told my hod, who was also his supervisor, what had happened he didn’t treat it at all seriously and I just let it go. I wouldn’t now and if a young female colleague told me that that had happened to her I’d make a serious complaint (Yvonne).

Discussing her study of students’ perceptions of doctoral vivas, Barbara Crossouard commented that the accounts she collected provided powerful testimony to the affective dimensions of (doctoral) learning and assessment. Far from being an objective, neutral technology, the viva process emerges as saturated with affect and often passionate emotions, a scene of emergence of subjects with “passionate attachments” ( Butler 1997 , p. 7, pp. 325-326).

The stories I was told lead to a similar conclusion. Doctoral examining is relational, emotional and ethical work and as such, despite academic cultural and institutional expectations and criteria as to what constitutes “doctorateness” ( Trafford and Leshem, 2009 ; Poole, 2014 ; Wellington, 2013 ), outcomes are influenced by subjectivities. This would seem to be the case regardless of academic discipline, raising questions (I shall not address here, see, rather Dobson, 2008 ; Jackson and Tinkler, 2001 ) about the viva’s fitness for purpose.

Research (e.g. Bloxham and Price, 2015 ; Wisker and Kiley, 2014 ) suggests that doctoral examiners set out wanting students to succeed. Although some of the stories I was told concerned negatively confrontational individuals, many of the experiences reported as being difficult and unpleasant concerned instances where success was, for whatever reason, made difficult. There were shock horror stories, certainly, but more of the problematic situations focussed on: having to disappoint candidates; apparently poor supervision; unreasonable fellow examiners; institutional relationships impacted by assessment decisions; students with unrealistic expectations or mistaken understandings of what doctoral study involved; and inappropriate uses of power.

Reflecting on their experiences a number of people talked about how they felt the nature of a PhD (leaving aside professional doctorates) had changed. Nigel put it like this: “Up until end of the 1970s there was an expectation that a thesis should be a scholarly, original, life work. From the 80s onwards it’s tended to be seen more as a craft piece”. This change is, at least partly, likely to do with the expansion in numbers undertaking doctorates. Other potentially associated factors are the perceived pressures: coming from university administrators and students themselves, to ensure that students, paying high fees, succeed; and the push from HEFCE [6] to meet submission deadlines which can lead to theses being submitted before they are “ready”. Such changes and pressures have implications for the assessment process and for examiners’ experiences of it.

[…] it suits our current neoliberal governments, in particular, to think of everyone having measureable and manipulative characteristics, and to this end, to think of any community and its members as entities, or objects, that can be pinned down, categorised and made predictable (p. xii).

Such characteristics, categorisation and predictability do not reflect the real world. Earlier I referred to Mills’ (1970) injunction to use the sociological imagination as a first step to ethical transformational change. Coming clean about the messiness and subjectivity of examining, sharing stories of personal uneasiness, making them public and discussing what might have been done to avoid difficult situations in an open and trusting CPD [7] context could help inform and develop ethical practices and can provide support and reassurance. In addition, the stories can be used to provide pointers for formulating institutional and departmental policies and codes of conduct concerning, for instance: expectations of supervisors; appointment of internal and external examiners; conduct of, and in, vivas; and alerting students as to what to expect. Such measures in themselves, like this paper, are a start and could make a contribution to the development of greater transparency and, thereby, more ethical doctoral examining.

Doctoral assessment takes different forms in different countries. This paper focuses on British vivas which essentially involve an internal examiner from the institution where the candidate has studied and an external from elsewhere meeting in private with the candidate.

John Wakeford’s PhD diaries (see www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/training-development/phd-supervisor-development/phd_diaries and www.missendencentre.co.uk/phdiaries.html offer “real” scenarios of challenges faced by doctoral supervisors and students which could also be useful to examiners.

“Sitting next to Nellie” refers to a type of apprenticeship model whereby the neophyte observes first and practices later (see Hargreaves, 1994 ).

Russell Group universities are prestigious UK research-oriented institutions.

Names are pseudonymous. External examiners usually receive around £150. Internal examiners are seldom paid.

Higher Education Funding Council.

Continuing Professional Development.

Bassnett , S. ( 2014 ), “ Cavalier attitudes lead to uncivil practices in vivas ”, Times Higher Education , available at: www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/comment/opinion/cavalier-attitudes-lead-to-uncivil-practices-in-viva/2013263.article (accessed 19 February 2015 ).

Bergin , J. and Westwood , R. ( 2003 ), “ The necessities of violence ”, Culture and Organisation , Vol. 9 No. 4 , pp. 211 - 223 .

Bloxham , S. and Price , M. ( 2015 ), “ External examining: fit for purpose? ”, Studies in Higher Education , Vol. 40 No. 2 , pp. 195 - 211 .

Bochner , A. ( 2014 ), Coming to Narrative: A Personal History of Paradigm Change in the Human Sciences , Left Coast Press , Walnut Creek, CA .

Bochner , A. and Riggs , N. ( 2014 ), “ Practising narrative inquiry ”, in Leavy , P. (Ed.), Handbook of Qualitative Methods , Oxford University Press , New York, NY , pp. 195 - 222 .

Booker , C. ( 2006 ), The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories , Continuum , London .

Bourke , S. and Holbrook , A. ( 2013 ), “ Examining PhD and research masters theses: looking at the consistency of grading across twelve indices of importance ”, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education , Vol. 38 No. 4 , pp. 407 - 416 .

Butler , J. ( 1997 ), Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative , Routledge , London and New York, NY .

Carter , B. and Whittaker , K. ( 2009 ), “ Examining the British PhD viva: opening new doors or scarring for life? ”, Contemporary Nurse , Vol. 32 Nos 1/2 , pp. 169 - 178 .

Carter , S. ( 2008 ), “ Examining the doctoral thesis: a discussion ”, Innovations in Education and Teaching International , Vol. 45 No. 4 , pp. 365 - 374 .

Clandinin , J. ( 2013 ), Engaging in Narrative Inquiry , Left Coast Press , Walnut Creek, CA .

Clarke , G.I. and Lunt ( 2014 ), “ The concept of ‘originality’: how is it interpreted by examiners? ”, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education , Vol. 39 No. 7 , pp. 803 - 820 .

Colley , H. and Silver , H. ( 2005 ), “ External examining and the benchmarking of standards ”, Higher Education Academy , York .

Crossouard , B. ( 2011 ), “ The doctoral viva voce as a cultural practice: the gendered production of academic subjects ”, Gender and Education , Vol. 23 No. 3 , pp. 313 - 329 .

Davies , B. ( 2014 ), Listening to Children: Being and Becoming , Routledge , London .

Day , C. , Sammons , P. , Stobart , G. , Kington , A. and Gu , Q. ( 2007 ), Teachers Matter: Connecting Lives, Work and Effectiveness , Open University Press/McGraw Hill , Maidenhead .

Dobson , S. ( 2008 ), “ Theorising the academic viva in higher education: the argument for a qualitative approach ”, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education , Vol. 33 No. 3 , pp. 277 - 288 .

Downs , Y. ( 2013 ), Reading and Teaching Ivor Goodson , Peter Lang , New York, NY .

Ellis , C. and Bochner , A. ( 2000 ), “ Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: researcher as subject ”, in Denzin , N. and Lincoln , Y. (Eds), Handbook of Qualitative Ethnography , 2nd ed. , Sage , Thousand Oaks, CA , pp. 733 - 768 .

Frank , A. ( 1995 ), The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics , Chicago University Press , Chicago, IL .

Frank , A. ( 2010 ), Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology , Chicago University Press , Chicago, IL .

Gibney , E. ( 2013 ), “ Are PhD vivas still fit for purpose? ”, available at: www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/are-phd-vivas-still-fit-for-purpose/2003341.article (accessed 19 February 2015 ).

Golding , C. , Sharmini , S. and Lazarovitch , A. ( 2014 ), “ What examiners do: what thesis students should know ”, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education , Vol. 39 No. 5 , pp. 563 - 576 .

Goodson , I. ( 1992 ), “ Studying teachers’ lives: an emergent field of inquiry ”, in Goodson , I. (Ed.), Studying Teachers’ Lives , Routledge , London , pp. 1 - 17 .

Goodson , I. ( 2013 ), Developing Narrative Theory , Routledge , London .

Grabbe , L. ( 2003 ), “ The trials of being a PHD external examiner ”, Quality Assurance in Education , Vol. 11 No. 2 , pp. 123 - 133 .

Group of 8 ( 2013 ), “ The changing PhD: Discussion Paper Turner ACT, Group of 8 ”, available at: www.go8.edu.au/__documents/go8-policy-analysis/2013/the-changing-phd_final.pdf (accessed 19 February 2015 ).

Hargreaves , D. ( 1994 ), “ The new professionalism: the synthesis of professional and institutional development ”, Teaching and Teacher Education , Vol. 10 No. 4 , pp. 423 - 438 .

Henry , J. ( 1965 ), Pathways to Madness , Vintage Books , New York, NY .

Jackson , C. and Tinkler , P. ( 2001 ), “ Back to basics: a consideration of the purposes of the PhD examination ”, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education , Vol. 26 No. 4 , pp. 355 - 366 .

Johnson , S. ( 1997 ), “ Examining the examiners: an analysis of examiners’ reports of doctoral theses ”, Studies in Higher Education , Vol. 22 No. 3 , pp. 333 - 347 .

Kiley , M. ( 2009 ), “ ‘You Don’t Want a Smart Alec’: selecting examiners to assess doctoral dissertations ”, Studies in Higher Education , Vol. 34 No. 8 , pp. 889 - 903 .

Lather , P. ( 1991 ), Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy With/In the Postmodern , Routledge , London .

Leonard , D. ( 2001 ), A Woman’s Guide to Doctoral Studies , Open University Press , Buckingham .

Medford , K. ( 2006 ), “ Caught with a fake ID: ethical questions about slippage in autoethnography ”, Qualitative Inquiry , Vol. 21 No. 5 , pp. 853 - 864 .

Mills , C.W. ( 1970 ), The Sociological Imagination , Penguin , Harmondsworth (First published in 1959 by Oxford University Press) .

Morley , L. ( 2004 ), “ Interrogating doctoral assessment ”, International Journal of Educational Research , Vol. 41 No. 2 , pp. 91 - 97 .

Morley , L. , Leonard , D. and David , M. ( 2002 ), “ Variations in vivas: quality and equality in British PhD assessment ”, Studies in Higher Education , Vol. 27 No. 3 , pp. 263 - 275 .

Morley , L. , Leonard , D. and David , M. ( 2013 ), “ Quality and equality in British PhD examination ”, in Webb , J. , Brien , D. and Burr , S. (Eds), TEXT Special Issue 22 October 2013 – Examining of Doctoral Degrees in Creative Arts: Process, Practice and Standards , available at: www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue22/Morley&Leonard&David.pdf (accessed 15 December 2013 ).

Mullins , G. and Kiley , M. ( 2002 ), “ ‘It’s a PhD, Not a Nobel Prize’: how experienced examiners assess research theses ”, Studies in Higher Education , Vol. 27 No. 4 , pp. 369 - 386 .

Murray , R. ( 2009 ), How to Survive Your Viva: Defending a Thesis , 2nd ed. , Open University Press/McGraw Hill , Maidenhead .

Park , C. ( 2003 ), “ Levelling the playing field: towards best practice in the doctoral viva ”, Higher Education Review , Vol. 36 No. 1 , pp. 47 - 67 .

Pearce , L. ( 2005 ), How to Examine a Thesis , Open University Press/McGraw Hill , Maidenhead .

Polkinghorne , D. ( 1988 ), Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences , State University of New York , Albany, NY .

Poole , B. ( 2014 ), “ The rather elusive concept of ‘doctorateness’: a reaction to wellington ”, Studies in Higher Education , Vol. 40 No. 9 , pp. 1507 - 1522 .

Redwood , S. ( 2008 ), “ Research less violent? On the ethics of performative social science ”, Forum: Qualitative Social Research , Vol. 9 No. 2 , available at: www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/407/882 (accessed 25 February 2015 ).

Reissmann , C. ( 2008 ), Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences , Sage , Thousand Oaks, CA .

Stanley , E. ( 1992 ), The Auto/Biographical I: Theory & Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography , Manchester University Press , Manchester .

Stanley , E. ( 1993 ), “ On auto/biography in sociology ”, Sociology , Vol. 27 No. 1 , pp. 41 - 52 .

Stenhouse , L. ( 1975 ), An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development , Heinemann , London .

Tinkler , P. and Jackson , C. ( 2004 ), The Doctoral Examination Process: A Handbook , Open University Press/McGraw Hill , Maidenhead .

Trafford , V. ( 2003 ), “ Questions in doctoral vivas: views from the inside ”, Quality Assurance in Education , Vol. 11 No. 2 , pp. 114 - 122 .

Trafford , V. and Leshem , S. ( 2002 ), “ Starting at the end to undertake doctoral research: predictable questions as stepping stones ”, Higher Education Review , Vol. 34 No. 1 , pp. 31 - 49 .

Trafford , V. and Leshem , S. ( 2009 ), “ Doctorateness as a threshold concept ”, Innovations in Education and Teaching International , Vol. 46 No. 3 , pp. 305 - 316 .

Van Gennep , A. ( 1909/1961 ), The Rites of Passage , University of Chicago Press , Chicago, IL .

Wellington , J. ( 2013 ), “ Searching for doctorateness ”, Studies in Higher Education , Vol. 38 No. 10 , pp. 1490 - 1503 .

Wisker , G.M and Kiley ( 2014 ), “ Professional learning: lessons for supervision from doctoral examining ”, International Journal for Academic Development , Vol. 19 No. 2 , pp. 125 - 138 .

Corresponding author

Related articles, all feedback is valuable.

Please share your general feedback

Report an issue or find answers to frequently asked questions

Contact Customer Support

University of Strathclyde -->

Thank you for viewing this 1newwebsite site. Unfortunately you are using an out of date browser that we have yet to test on. Please upgrade your browser to improve your experience.

Strathclyde Business School

How to (and how not to) prepare for your phd viva.

Anyone doing a PhD will feel nerves kick in as they approach the date of the PhD viva. Here, Rohan Sachdev explains how he coped and gives some tips on how to get yourself ready for that all important event.

After having spent years writing my doctoral thesis, the moment of submission for examination was quite confusing for me. I felt a sense of relief but also a wave of panic for the PhD viva. I had written all I could and it was approved by my supervisors. But now I had to prepare to defend it in person in front of a panel that would decide the fate of my hard work. The only question that crippled me for the first couple of weeks was “Where do I start?”

The process of preparing for this once-in-a-lifetime experience can be intimidating. With so much information out there on the process, I wondered, “how much of it is relevant to me?” I spent countless nights reading about other researcher’s experiences and fixated on the bad experiences. Of course, I thought, this would happen to me.

Having gone through this emotional and intellectual roller coaster, I now know better; I now know where I went right and where I went wrong in my preparation. There is no one appropriate guide on how to prepare for a viva. There is no singular “right way” of preparing for it. It all depends on your thesis, your subject area, your university, and even the country you’re studying in.

In saying that, there are some pointers to consider. These are not hard lines that one must do, but things you may want to keep in mind while preparing.

Do: Read through all the guidance issued to you by your academic team

Remember, your supervisors and faculty in your department do this all the time, they may have been external examiners, internal examiners, chairs, and they have even gone through the same process you are going through. Ask them for advice. Check with them if a mock viva can be arranged for you about a week before the big day.

Don’t: Read through horror stories of badly gone vivas on the internet

The internet is a house of horrors when it comes to viva preparation. People are more likely to express and discuss their negative experiences. They may not even be relevant to you; their systems may be completely different where they studied. It may be good to know the potential outcomes, but not at the cost of scaring yourself.

Do: Systematically review your entire thesis end to end

After you’ve submitted, take some time off, go to that restaurant you’ve been eyeing, have some fun. Then print your thesis, sit down, and read it thoroughly without a pen in your hand. Know what is in your thesis without any additional notes. It is key to prepare well for your viva, but overpreparation may be counterproductive.

Don’t: Make extensive notes of your thesis

Making long notes will only stress you out. Once you’ve read your thesis thoroughly without a pen, take another week-long break and read it again - this time, with a pen. If you come across any typos, mark them. On the top of each page, write down one sentence about what’s on that page. Make a list of potential questions and consider how you could answer them. Avoid memorising pre-written answers. These steps will make it easier for your final revision the week before your viva.

Do: Ask for advice from your peers who have been through it before

Just as with your supervisors, fellow students from your department who have recently finished their PhD will have a good idea of the experience. Get an insight into what they went through. Ask for any tips and generic questions they were asked at the start of their viva. These will all be more relevant to you than anything you read online.

Don’t: Take advice from your non-academic friends and family

Sometimes, the advice you get from people around you who don’t completely understand the process of a PhD and/or what you’re doing can stress you out. Try and stick to talking about your in-depth preparation strategy to peers and friends who have a good idea of what the processes are.

Do: Lightly read blogs on viva preparation (NOT outcomes)

A lot of blogs and discussion threads out there are dedicated to viva preparation. Find these threads so you can interact with people and get hints from them. Try not to think about the outcome, you will only stress yourself out more. One of the keys is to relax and enjoy the experience.

Don’t: Google “how to fail your PhD in 1 minute”

If you’re as obsessive about the viva as I was, you may be tempted to gauge exactly what the examiners are thinking and end up googling things you shouldn’t. Coming across such posts, blogs and videos is the ultimate ‘don’t’ when it comes to preparation. Try to stay off these negative thoughts and focus on the other more important steps.

Do: Check out what your examiners have worked on

Having a good idea of the point of view your examiners come from is good to prepare for the types of questions you could get asked. Find their published papers and go over them. See what similarities you have to their style of writing and things they focus on for a hint on what to expect.

Don’t: Try to appease your examiners and change things to appeal to them

Having read their work, it is now too late to change your thesis to appease your examiners. Moreover, the point of doing your research is to express your point of view. Politely defend yourself in the viva, but don’t change things when you’re explaining them to make them happy. You are now on your path to becoming an independent researcher, after all!

In the end, the "dos and don’ts" are just for guidance, and represent the things that worked well for me. If there is anything different that works better for you, do that. This is your journey.

The three keys to eventual success are: Prepare, relax, and don’t obsess. You’ve done your best in writing the thesis, now it's time to show the examiners how well you can explain it. Remember, you’re inching towards the finish line. You’ve got this!

For more information on PhDs at Strathclyde, please click here and for more information on research degrees at Strathclyde Business School, click here

About Rohan Sachdev

Rohan Sachdev, a PhD Graduand in Economics at Strathclyde Business School, will graduate in November. He is now based in Belfast, working as a Research Economist at the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute Northern Ireland. His PhD thesis is titled “The use of Multi-Sectoral Models in evaluating the Macroeconomic impacts of reduced Household Consumption of Sin Goods: The Case of Alcohol Consumption in Scotland”.

Stay in touch

    The Business School Blog     Latest Newsletter     Join us on Linkedin     Follow us on Twitter     Join us on Facebook     Visit our YouTube channel

Contact details

 Undergraduate admissions   +44 (0)141 548 4114   [email protected]  

 Postgraduate admissions   +44(0)141 553 6118 / 6119   [email protected]

Strathclyde Business School University of Strathclyde 199 Cathedral Street Glasgow G4 0QU

Triple accredited

My viva was awful - need advice

Hi everyone, I have had a long and very challenging journey in my PhD due to my personal circumstances. I almost quit dozens of times. In the end, I persevered and submitted a thesis back in September of last year. It wasn't the greatest thesis and I definitely knew I was going to get some sort of corrections either minor or major as it was a rushed job. My supervisor never gave me a clear indication as to which way it would go but the week before my viva, he seemed pretty positive and told me I'm likely looking at minor corrections (in my uni major is not a pass - and you're given 12 months to resubmit). I had my viva a few days ago and it was the hardest thing I have ever experienced. One of the examiners came 15 minutes late, didn't apologise, and started with an intense question. For 2 hours, the tempo kept being intense. The external examiner started by telling me " When I saw the title your thesis, I thought not again!". It really felt like they were trying to trip me up the entire time and I think the only positive comment I received was "we both thought this was an interesting topic" yet it seemed like the entire time they were questioning the validity of the topic itself. I found really strange was that out of the 200 questions that I had prepared (there is a list circulating on the internet) I only got four of those. In addition, they did not ask me questions about my actual findings/ specific chapters of my thesis - they just kept asking really vague theoretical questions not directly related to my thesis. In the end I got major corrections and have 12 months to resubmit. I am feeling quite disheartened. Due to their overall attitude I am really worried about trying to address their comments (which I am yet to receive) as it feels so subjective (they didn't like the topic to begin with). I know that my findings are valid and I know that my topic is interesting but what is the point if those who are evaluating me don't think so? I am seriously considering quitting as I just don't know if I can do it anymore. I have work and family commitments and can't imagine spending more time this. I am not a crier and have spent the last week crying every single day because they made me feel like such a failure.

Hi! The same thing happened to me, i'm hoping to resubmit in the coming months. I think if you have 12 months, then most likely the first months you won't be able to focus on it as it will make you feel bad. If you are in the UK, your re-viva should have an independent chair, which should help you somewhat. If you think their comments are unreasonable, you can say so. Some examiners are just dicks (mine won't let me graduate unless i use his rejected paper as the foundation for my whole thesis!) and sadly there is no good way aroudn that, but the uni probably won't want you to fail, so you can get advice and they may try to make the re-viva more impartial. I think before you think about quitting it would be worth just taking some time to let it all sink in and die down. For me I was still too annoyed about it even 5 months later and its only very recently that I've been able to sit down and work through it. For me it took realising how bad my examiners paper was and making a big list of all of its flaws, i realised he is a moron and i started to treat it as a comedy rather than a horror story. The uni have assured me that the re-viva will have enough checks and balances in place that he won't be able to do anything corrupt this time hopefully. Take some time, get some advice from the uni (also students union if you feel the examiner is unfair) and then see how you feel :)

I'm not in the best position to give advice here - I'm 5 weeks from submitting my own PhD, which I am far from confident in and can't imagine will possibly be finished in that amount of time. I can't fully imagine how you're feeling, but I just wanted to send some support. And think about the hurdles you've already passed - you did finish the thing! You submitted it and got through a viva. No matter the outcome or what comes next, I hope you can take some time to just breathe, put it out of your head until you receive the corrections, and then decide what you want to do. You don't have to decide now. tr1992's advice sounds great and comes from a place of experience. It's ok to be sad, angry and annoyed. I've been asking myself all day every day why I decided to put myself through this, but we all had our reasons and one day it will be behind us! Sending you strength.

Thank you so much tr1992 - I am sorry you had to go through that. Your examiner definitely sounds like a dick! I find that it really is a strange process as so much of it ends up being linked to someone's subjective perception of your approach/data etc. The chair did say to me as she was walking me out of the room as they deliberated : "that was intense". I still am struggling with the fact that it felt unfair. I don't mind the major corrections and constructive criticism but I am struggling with the fact that they were absolute dicks. The second examiner is new to all of this so she kept just acquiescing to what the external examiner was saying. I think I will do what you have suggested and just let it all sink in for now and see what their feedback is. Really appreciate the advice! Best of luck with your corrections!

Thank you castle85 for the words of encouragement. I hear you - I also wonder why I chose to do this. Even more so as I have no interest whatsoever in academia. Sending you strength for the last few weeks!

One of the most important things to note are any procedural irregularities - you examiner arriving late in itself may not be substantial grounds for appeal, but if they they indicated their review or the viva itself was rushed as a result, this would definitely qualify. A viva is intrinsically very subjective; there's considerable debate over whether, in modern academia, 2 people picked by your supervisor is the best way to examine years of work. Unfortunately you can't change the system. But you can consider: - If there indeed are any procedural irregularities, these are much more open and successful for appeal than academic judgement. It's generally not worth arguing the verdict, but you can readily argue the process by which it was reached. For example, if your supervisor was required to sign off on the submission and did not do so, or did not do so following the correct process, this is certainly grounds for appeal. The general feeling in academia is that a supervisor that has allowed a student to submit a failed PhD is, in many ways, the one responsible for the fail (though, of course, the student is the one that suffers). - Forgetting that for a moment, if they passed you with majors (and a pass with majors, is a pass, never forget that) - you may find yourself surprised by how achievable the corrections are. It is the job of examiners to be critical and combative - and shred you, as required - this is not necessarily a bad thing if they then give you corrections that are achievable and will make your PhD better. The only point you need to revert to complaint about process is if the corrections are flatly unachievable; like repeating a study without any resources or time. Otherwise you will likely find highly critical examiners are very unlikely to reject majors if it's clear the candidate has put the effort in. You will see horror stories on these forums; and it does, sadly, happen, but often with majors examiners are trying to send a strong message, which if the candidate listens to, they will have a lot of empathy for. - Note your external can shred you and actually be a mediocre academic at best. In fact, the worst/least experienced academics are, by a mile, the most critical. You can make the judgement call on whether to dispute them, but usually the best call is to (sadly) acquiesce, and disprove their judgement in your postdoctoral work, when they don't have any hold over you. What perhaps blows my mind in this and other posts is - what was the supervisor thinking? I'm thinking we're sadly moving to a world where the blind lead the blind, and the inexperienced supervisor googles rather than knows people with relevant expertise. It really should not be the case a viva is a surprise for a student, or that the opinions of the examiners massively differ from the supervisor.

Post your reply

Postgraduate Forum

Masters Degrees

PhD Opportunities

Postgraduate Forum Copyright ©2024 All rights reserved

PostgraduateForum Is a trading name of FindAUniversity Ltd FindAUniversity Ltd, 77 Sidney St, Sheffield, S1 4RG, UK. Tel +44 (0) 114 268 4940 Fax: +44 (0) 114 268 5766

Welcome to the world's leading Postgraduate Forum

An active and supportive community.

Support and advice from your peers.

Your postgraduate questions answered.

Use your experience to help others.

Sign Up to Postgraduate Forum

Enter your email address below to get started with your forum account

Login to your account

Enter your username below to login to your account

Reset password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password

An email has been sent to your email account along with instructions on how to reset your password. If you do not recieve your email, or have any futher problems accessing your account, then please contact our customer support.

or continue as guest

Postgrad Forum uses cookies to create a better experience for you

To ensure all features on our website work properly, your computer, tablet or mobile needs to accept cookies. Our cookies don’t store your personal information, but provide us with anonymous information about use of the website and help us recognise you so we can offer you services more relevant to you. For more information please read our privacy policy

I had a brutal PhD viva followed by two years of corrections.

Here is what i learned about vivas, phds, & myself..

Jimmy Tidey

The Faculty

Here is what I learned from a grinding, traumatising and occasionally comic journey towards getting a PhD. In the UK, a viva is a verbal defence of your thesis; unlike other countries, it is not a formality, there are lots of ways it can go wrong.

[You can contact me at [email protected] if you’d like to chat about this article.]

For me, getting a PhD was a deflating struggle across an arbitrary finish line; a relief rather than a cause for celebration.

Writing the thesis took four years of challenging but satisfying work. The subsequent corrections, however, were exceptionally unpleasant — I woke up every day knowing that my sense of self-worth, not to mention years of work, hung in the balance. My weekends were spent at my laptop, sometimes physically struggling to type through anxiety, responding to feedback written by two examiners with whom I could not communicate, who are accountable to no one, and whose feedback nobody was able to confidently interpret. Even though I’d moved on to a full-time job, undertaking the corrections dominated my life more totally than any other part of the PhD process.

Before I’d submitted my thesis, I wish I’d read a frank account of a PhD viva that didn’t go to plan. Such accounts seem to be relatively uncommon, perhaps because drawing the curtain back and showing the grim details of how you got permission to put ‘Dr.’ before your name ruins the mystique — especially if you are an academic with admiring students.

I hope that if you are doing a PhD, or considering one, my experience can provide a useful perspective on what the end game is like — perhaps even a warning. Of course, there is also an aspect of catharsis in relating this story.

I don’t want to scare anyone unnecessarily, two years of corrections is an unusual outcome. On the other hand, while I might not be typical, I’m also not that atypical. At the Royal College of Art, in 2018 and 2019, around 25% of students got major corrections. Whether or not they were as long-winded as mine, they will have been a nightmare for the recipient.

If I could convey one thought about doctoral research, it would be this: there is a colossal disparity between how you think about your PhD and how the university thinks of it. For you, the thesis will become a profoundly personal endeavour, embodying your most careful reflections on a subject that you are devoted to. The heroic effort involved will make your emotional bond with the thesis even deeper. By contrast, from the perspective of a university, the thesis is a disposable dummy run, a formal training exercise, a prelude to any actual research.

No matter how hard you try to remember that a PhD thesis is a bureaucratic formalism, it’s hard not to become personally invested. A classic refrain — one that I tried to keep in mind at all times to ward off loss of perspective — is that no one will read your thesis except your supervisors and examiners. None the less, everything about the writing process fosters the delusion that you are creating something that will be treated, at least by that tiny audience, with a modicum of respect.

In my viva, the personal investment that had driven me forward for so long train-wrecked into a wall of indifference. I am an extreme case, but I expect other PhD veterans will recognise some echos in their own experience.

In case you aren’t familiar with the details, I’ll briefly describe the process of doing a PhD. I did my PhD at the RCA, in design research, focusing on software design. Approaches vary by institution, but the RCA system will give a flavour. First, you’ll need to write a thesis — in the UK, that might take between three and five years. Then, two’ external examiners’ from other universities, selected for their expertise in your area of research, read your thesis and interview you about it.

This interview is called a ‘viva’, or a ‘defence’. A chairperson oversees your viva. Your PhD supervisor — the university professor who is in charge of you throughout the PhD — may also attend, but cannot speak. At the RCA, your supervisor sits behind you so you cannot make eye contact; however, they are allowed to make notes to help you interpret the feedback. At the end of the viva, the examiners will decide between four options: pass with no corrections, minor corrections, major corrections or failure. Minor corrections are those that the examiners anticipate can be completed in three months, and the candidate can be nearly certain of passing. Most candidates can expect some minor corrections, as small as nit-picks about grammar, occasionally more extensive re-writes. Major corrections are those anticipated to take longer than three months, and a significant possibility of failure remains.

I got major corrections. When I submitted my response to the corrections, I got a further round of corrections, taking two years to complete in total. I believe experiences similar to mine could occur in many disciplines, but, in case you are curious, I built a social media analytics tool intended for use by local government, called ‘LocalNets’. LocalNets filtered and visualised Twitter data to give insights into local civic issues — crime, planning, policing, etc. My thesis reflected on design principles for social media analytics tools, drawing on my experience with LocalNets.

Just before we stepped into the room where the viva took place, my supervisor reassured me that the examiners would not have turned up to the viva unless they saw at least some merit in my work. I couldn’t comprehend what I was hearing — supervisors have to approve your thesis before you can submit. Why would they have approved my submission if such significant doubts remained? At the time, I chalked it up to nerves on the supervisors’ part; looking back it was the first hint of the risk that I had been allowed to take.

In the run-up to the viva I was preparing for — looking forward to, in fact — being grilled on every arcane technical nuance of my work — could I explain Arrow’s impossibility theorem? How does Nussbaum’s account of capability diverge from Sen’s? All the things I’d been filling my head with for four years. I was exhilarated at the prospect of having my work taken seriously and defending my ideas.

This expectation was misplaced; my viva ignored nearly every substantial aspect of my research with exquisite deftness. The examiners focused almost exclusively on the periphery of my work, the structure of the appendices or questions about disciplinary boundaries. Was my thesis truly a work of design research, or was it sociological? I expected this question and had a prepared answer. We circled this issue for what seemed like a large proportion of the viva. I still have no idea what was at stake here, none of the corrections I was given related to this topic.

On only one occasion did we discuss something I considered to be a significant component of my thesis. I was critical of the way contemporary design research fails to engage with fundamental ethical philosophy. I knew I was in contested territory, and I was anticipating having to defend my views. One examiner suggested that my ethical argument was a ‘straw man’ because design researchers often specify their ethical framework. I said that what was frequently missing, in my view, was an account of how they had selected that ethical framework. The examiner looked at me and said a single word — ‘ok’. In the corrections, I was asked to remove the ethical discussion from my thesis en bloc. ‘Ok’ did not indicate, as I had assumed, a clarification successfully communicated, but instead was more akin to a psychiatrist muttering ‘ok’ as a patient elaborates a paranoid fantasy.

If the examiners were indifferent to the intellectual aspects of my work, they were even less interested in the basic facts of what I had done. The first question in my viva was, “Does your software collect tweets automatically?” I could not have been more stunned if the examiner had hit me round the head with a frying pan. The software I created processed approximately 28 million tweets. Did the examiners think I had copy-pasted 28 million tweets? I had written whole chapters about automating the collection and processing of tweets, what else could my software have been doing? I don’t know if I misinterpreted, but in the viva and the corrections, I saw evidence that the examiners had only the most distant understanding of what I’d done during my practical work.

At the beginning of the viva, as is required, I gave a presentation. It was like going for a jog on dry sand. Every bit of energy I projected was absorbed without the slightest reaction. The examiners were like black holes — as I spoke, each syllable sailed over their emotional event horizon without a ripple of rapport left in its wake. I was left with the feeling that every word I said was a waste of their time. One examiner avoided eye contact throughout the viva, directing their gaze almost exclusively at the floor. It’s nearly impossible to give an answer to someone who won’t meet your eye. I don’t know if this is an established interrogation technique, but it is an excellent way to destabilise someone. The disdain the examiners evinced throughout the viva was far beyond anything I have experienced in any other setting.

When the chair told me the result was major corrections, neither of the examiners could look at me. Their failure to acknowledge me had a lasting impact on my emotional response. I did not leave the viva feeling that I’d handed in substandard academic work, as you might expect. Instead, I had the visceral sense that I was the object of physical disgust. When I say physical disgust, I’m not using that turn of phrase only to convey intensity — I mean very literally that I felt as I might have done if I’d vomited down myself. I had an almost primordial sense of being repulsive, as though the examiners had gagged at the smell of me. The feeling lasted for weeks.

There was a feeling of shame, but also anger — anger at the examiners’ personal cowardice in failing to meet my eye after having been so enthusiastic in dismantling years of my work. It’s a detail, but it seemed to make the experience doubly pathetic — pathetic on their part and mine. In the longer term, I felt grief, compounded by the fact that I had brought the situation on myself. I also experienced kindness from friends and strangers that I found incredibly moving.

The examiners may have been brutal, but they could make a case that they were fulfilling their academic duties. Their role is to judge whether your work reaches the standard of a PhD. They can, and in my case did, do this with very little interest in the research itself. Again, a question of perspective: for you, it’s deeply personal; for the examiners, it’s a dispassionate dissection. Their lack of interest was, for me, more psychologically damaging than their hostility.

Immediately after my viva, my supervisor and I wanted a private room to discuss the outcome with the chair of the exam. Bear in mind that we’re in art school. There was only one room available, and, presumably as part of someone’s art project, it was knee-deep with balloons. I sat there, shattered like a dropped wine glass, wishing I could drown in the primary colours bobbing around me, waiting for the chairperson to deliver the gruesome post-mortem details. She arrived with a beaming smile. She loves balloons! She started to tell a story of the time she saw a funny balloon. She looked through her phone for some considerable time, finding a photo of the funny balloon. We looked at the funny balloon. I’m sorry to disappoint — I cannot remember what was funny about the balloon; my brain must have capsized.

For you, the viva is the pinnacle of years of research; your thesis is a timeless contribution to the stock of human knowledge. For the university, it’s just behind an amusing balloon in terms of significance. I understand the chair was looking for a moment of lightness in a dark situation, but the infantilising tactlessness of it captures the absence of empathy and decency that characterised the examination process.

Reflecting the total lack of importance the university accords to the whole enterprise, all kinds of logistical mistakes occurred in my examination process. Perhaps most egregiously, my examiners were not told that my examination was ‘by practice’. By practice exams are relatively uncommon outside of the world of art and design research, and mandate an unusually low 40,000-word limit. When the examiners received my 40,000-word thesis, it must have seemed perplexingly, probably lazily, short. The word count I was working to only became apparent to the examiners mid-viva when I mentioned it. It is impossible to know how this failure of communication affected the outcome. Again, that question of perspective: I’ve been haunted for years by the thought that I might have a better outcome had this mistake not been made; from the university’s point of view, the mistake is just an inconsequential admin glitch.

The corrections

A candidate given major corrections will receive a list of the improvements the examiners expect them to make. In theory, the candidate can ask for clarification from the examiners if there is any ambiguity; however the discussion will be mediated by the chair, who has no specialist knowledge of the PhD subject area, so this channel of communication is limited. Within one year, the candidate is expected to resubmit the corrected PhD thesis, accompanied by a commentary connecting their amendments to the list of corrections issued by the examiners.

Some of the corrections I received led to clear improvements to my thesis. Some of them asked me to remove sections altogether — a disappointing necessity I was not going to contest. Other corrections were harder to understand: asking me to add a chapter that already existed, or to explain in more detail prosaic aspects of research I’d already addressed at mind-numbing length. One correction seemed to be asking that I change the shape of the arrows in a diagram, so, through tears of disbelief, I replaced right angles with curves. After the first round of corrections — and months of anxious waiting for an outcome — a second round was required.

Often, when I added text to address the corrections, I had to remove something else to stay within the word limit. Was I removing content the examiners considered essential? Given my track record of anticipating the examiners, every edit felt like a spin of the roulette wheel.

One December evening, months after I had submitted the second round of corrections, I received an email telling me the PhD had been accepted. Beyond the examiners’ decision to accept the thesis, I have no idea what they thought of it — they do not give feedback. PhD corrections are Kafkaesque — so much arbitrary and traumatising work without ever being able to imagine a human mind behind the process.

The consequences

Over the two years that the corrections took, everything else in my life was paralysed. I constantly laboured under the impression that I could be weeks away from completion, only to have the finish line recede into the distance as new corrections, or new interpretations of the corrections, arrived from various quarters.

Writing, a crucial part of my life, came to a dead stop because of the knock-out blow to my confidence. Worse — and I understand this is not wholly rational — I was concerned that anything I published might be held against me by the examiners as evidence that I had not sufficiently recanted my views. I mention this to highlight the paranoia of the corrections process; trying to read every interpretation into a few paragraphs of feedback on which so much hangs.

Before the viva, I was setting myself up to continue my research once I’d finished the doctorate — running collaborations, publishing write-ups of my work. I was working on a tool that explored citation networks on Google Scholar — and excited to see it starting to attract users. I watched all my projects collapse as I focused on the corrections and dealt with the psychological fallout. Someone with more mental fortitude than me might have kept all the plates spinning, but I couldn’t manifest the grit.

For me, the viva outcome meshed perfectly with my deepest fears — that no one can understand my writing, that my ideas are perceived as malicious, that my interdisciplinarity has left me with no recognised expertise whatsoever. The topic I had previously assumed would become central to my career became a site of trauma so intense that the whole area was off-limits.

In short, I eventually got the piece of paper to prove I have a PhD, but by precisely the same act, all of the avenues for using the PhD were, at least temporarily, shut down.

What went wrong

I underestimated the risk of major corrections and the awfulness of the corrections process. I overestimated the quality of my writing. My work on design ethics, and other parts of the thesis, were needless hostages to fortune and should have been edited out long before submission. Perhaps the examiners could have been better chosen. All these factors are down to me, although I could have received much better support.

I was lucky that my supervisors were kind and had plenty of time for me, but ultimately our amicable relationship was disguising the fact they were not sufficiently critical of my work. The interdisciplinary nature of my thesis, which mixed political economy, design research and sociology, made it harder to supervise. Perhaps my lack of experience in design research was not taken into account. My background in tech was part of the reason I was offered a place on the PhD program, and it allowed me to produce software that helped the funding program address its overall research goals. However, when it came to supervision, extra support to offset my lack of experience was not forthcoming.

As you can see, I was very naive, though perhaps not quite as naive as I’ve made it sound. Nothing in my PhD process hinted at how the viva would go — I had no issues in my annual interim exams or my mock viva, I had a good relationship with my supervisors and their support when I submitted.

I have painted a picture of a viva as a moment where the university’s understanding of a PhD as a training exercise clashes with the student’s profoundly personal investment in their work. That clash of perspectives is important, but the broader truth is that in a viva, years of complex work are evaluated in a necessarily subjective way over the course of a few hours — casualties are inevitable. Part of what happened was just the luck of the draw; an unfortunate combination of supervisors, examiners, miscommunication, and, of course, the shortcomings of my thesis.

Lessons learned

I have only experienced one viva at one institution; my experience may not generalise. However, there are some practical lessons I would draw on if I ever had another viva. I would:

• Ensure I’d had an utterly candid conversation with my supervisors about the risks they perceived in my thesis. For a thesis that crossed disciplinary boundaries, I would also ask my supervisors how confident they were in identifying potential hazards outside their specialist area.
• Draw up a list of potential examiners at a formative stage of the research and keep it updated. Picking the examiners is as important as writing the thesis.
• Be constantly vigilant for administrative mistakes across the examination process. I regretted not getting legal guidance immediately after my viva, even if only to understand the options. At the same there are lots of risks (and costs) associated with consulting a lawyer. especially if your University finds out about it.

Most of all, as much as is possible, I would brace myself for the combination of indifference and hostility I have described in this account. Universities love looking down their nose at the ethics of the commercial world. For all that posturing, academia has incredibly low standards when it comes to how individuals are treated. I have never encountered a job interview, or any other professional situation, that even approached the complexion of my viva.

When I wrote my application to the RCA, I got help from someone who had just finished a long PhD. They talked about their doctorate with a reluctant mournfulness that I couldn’t understand — probably I didn’t want to. I promised myself I wouldn’t end up that way. I thought people who did PhDs were all otherworldly, idealistic and impractical, where I, coming from the commercial world, was pragmatic and robust. I loved writing, had a rock-solid idea of my research area, funding, and a calm detachment that I thought would see me through. How wrong I was.

Now it’s over. I got an unwanted, but no doubt beneficial, lesson in resilience; a counterpart to realising that I’m fragile in a way I hadn’t understood before. I got an extensive, possibly excessive, lesson in armour-plating my written arguments. I even got a PhD, which I might not have done.

I’m writing again. I love telling a story, and, though I wish this one was not in the first person, I hope it does something to help others understand the risks of the PhD examination process.

If you’ve had a bad PhD viva and need some solidarity, send me a message.

Written by Jimmy Tidey

Civic stuff, network analysis, AI & agents, deliberation, design research, UXR.

Text to speech

Viva Survivors

Daily viva help for PhDs

Subscribe via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe and receive new posts by email.

Email Address

Randomly…

Viva prep ebooks, recently…, to be continued, find your way, 3 questions to ask your supervisors before submission, notes to yourself, not too…, questioning weakness, several steps back, tags & themes.

After submission you need to prepare for your viva – but you also need to prepare for life after the PhD. For some that could be simple (or welcome!) but for all candidates, particularly those who have attachments to physical...

Share this:

• Daily Post Sabbatical

That’s the key to getting viva preparations done. There are core tasks and activities, but no blueprint for when, where and how you do them. You need to read your thesis. Do you do that in an afternoon? For an...

Viva preparation starts after submission, but the right questions – asked in advance – can help you submit well and set up your success in your preparation and viva. Before submission, ask your supervisors the following and build on these...

A practice I return to again and again is to leave a note on my desk to help Future-Nathan get started when they sit down for work. It’s a kindness, a little thing to help me get going. I could...

How much preparation do I need to do? Not too much. How long will the viva be? Not too long. How tough will the questions be? Not too tough. How critical will my examiners be? Not too critical. How often...

There are many causes of doubt before the viva. One possibility is that a candidate believes some aspect of their research or thesis isn’t good enough. They find a weakness and then can do nothing but dwell on it. If...

You might have to take a step back when writing up to really ask yourself, “What else does this need?” You might have to take a step back from your thesis at submission, to give yourself space to reflect before...

Internal Vs External

Candidates focus on the distinction between internal and external examiners a lot. Have you heard these nuggets of examiner-related folk wisdom before? Your external is likely to be more of an expert in your field than your internal. Your internal...

Making A Difference

It’s what you must have done over the course of your PhD. Your research and thesis must have a significant, original contribution – or, more simply, you must have made a difference. Something now exists that didn’t before and that...

“Scrawl” is a great word to describe how I used to annotate papers during my PhD. I hated reading papers. I much preferred doing maths: balancing equations, defining functions, exploring little curiosities that popped into my head. It never occurred...

More From Forbes

New report shows remote work won’t make you happy, here’s what will.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Linkedin

Working remote may not make you happy.

If you’re like most people, you want flexible work, including the opportunity to work remote or hybrid. But while remote and hybrid work offer plenty of advantages, they may not be the panacea you expect.

A surprising new report shows that people who work in the office full time don’t have significantly different levels of happiness or satisfaction than those with more choices about their work location.

Where you work is a legitimate concern. As the debate rages on about where work should happen and what’s best for companies and for people, you want the best alternatives for how and where you work.

It turns out that it may be less about where you work than about the leadership, culture and practices at your organization—and the relationships you have with colleagues.

Working Remote (or Hybrid) Isn’t Ideal

Vast majorities of people want flexibility in where they work. In particular, 61% of those working in remote-capable jobs wanted to work at home sometimes, and another 28% preferred to be fully remote, according to a Gallup survey . But this isn’t really news. Tons of people have been seeking remote, hybrid and flexible work since it became more available during the pandemic.

‘Inside Out 2’ Debuts On Digital Streaming This Week

Acclaimed horror thriller oddity debuts on digital streaming this week, nyt ‘strands’ hints, spangram and answers for sunday, august 18th.

The real news is that when it comes to balancing the demands of work and life or avoiding burnout, remote work isn’t significantly better than hybrid or onsite work.

• The percentage of people who strongly agree they are able to maintain a healthy balance between work and life is 33% for remote workers, 27% for hybrid and 25% for onsite workers.
• And the proportion of people who are very often or always burned out is 24% for remote, 27% for hybrid and 27% for onsite workers.

So remote work is good, but it’s not significantly better than other ways of working.

The Work That Will Make You Happy

So what what’s going on? And what can actually make you happy?

1 – A Culture of Trust

Your ability to meet the demands of your work and your life, to flex and to make choices that drive your happiness and fulfillment are significantly based on whether you feel like your organization and your leader trust you.

Even if your employer has formal policies that support remote or hybrid work, you’ll be able to navigate demands most effectively when you have cultural permission do so.

Don’t just look for remote or hybrid work opportunities, look for cultures where you feel valued and trusted and where you see other employees also flexing their schedules or their work locations.

Seek employers where you have autonomy, choice and control and where you’re treated as an adult. No matter what your work location is, these will help you feel happier and more fulfilled.

Look for work experiences where you feel connected to colleagues.

2 – A Sense of Impact

Another element that will provide a greater sense of satisfaction with your work is when you have an impact. We all have an instinct to matter . In fact, one of the characteristics of burnout is feeling like you’re ineffective.

Look for jobs where you have clear expectations and you’re working toward goals that matter to you—and where you get plenty of feedback that lets you know how you’re contributing. Find opportunities where you can easily see how your role on the team is integral and how your deliverables affect others.

Whether you’re working remote, hybrid or in the office, you’ll feel better when you have clarity on your responsibilities and a purpose that makes you want to wake up in the morning—even to make a small (but meaningful!) contribution to the whole.

3 – Leaders Who Care

Another key element of a great work experience is leaders who care. In fact, when people feel like their leader is empathetic, they report better happiness, engagement, innovation and willingness to stay with the organization.

No matter your work location, look for leaders who pay attention and check in with you—and who demonstrate that they care by asking questions, listening and providing support. Find the organizations where leaders receive ongoing development and are continuously trying to get better at guiding, coaching and communicating.

4 – Connections with Colleagues

A hallmark of happiness at work is feeling a sense of belonging. Find work where you can get to know your teammates , learn from them and appreciate them.

Look for jobs and organizations where people value each other, take time for each other and help each other—and where they have a shared sense of identity through mutual outcomes.

No matter where you work, proximity drives relationships. If you’re working at a distance, keep your camera on and stay in frequent communication with teammates using all kinds of channels.

If you’re in the office, invite colleagues for coffee and lean into work that you’re doing together.

Regardless of your location, get to know colleagues before, during and after meetings. Invest time in understanding them and what makes them tick.

5 – Learning and Growth

One of the symptoms of burnout is feeling like you’re trapped and have no place to grow. As a result, opportunities for learning and career development can drive greater levels of satisfaction.

Whether you’re working remote, hybrid or in the office, be sure you choose jobs or organizations that offer classes to build your skills, training on the job and access to mentors.

Performing Well No Matter Where You Work

No matter where you work, you want to do your best. And great performance is linked with better self-esteem, happiness and satisfaction.

Ultimately, you need support for working in the ways that work best for you—whether that’s remote, hybrid or in the office. From tools, technology, processes or policies to culture and leadership, you need a company that invests in you—so you can invest in your work.

• Editorial Standards
• Reprints & Permissions

Join The Conversation

One Community. Many Voices. Create a free account to share your thoughts. 

Forbes Community Guidelines

Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space.

In order to do so, please follow the posting rules in our site's  Terms of Service.   We've summarized some of those key rules below. Simply put, keep it civil.

Your post will be rejected if we notice that it seems to contain:

• False or intentionally out-of-context or misleading information
• Insults, profanity, incoherent, obscene or inflammatory language or threats of any kind
• Attacks on the identity of other commenters or the article's author
• Content that otherwise violates our site's  terms.

User accounts will be blocked if we notice or believe that users are engaged in:

• Continuous attempts to re-post comments that have been previously moderated/rejected
• Racist, sexist, homophobic or other discriminatory comments
• Attempts or tactics that put the site security at risk
• Actions that otherwise violate our site's  terms.

So, how can you be a power user?

• Stay on topic and share your insights
• Feel free to be clear and thoughtful to get your point across
• ‘Like’ or ‘Dislike’ to show your point of view.
• Protect your community.
• Use the report tool to alert us when someone breaks the rules.

Thanks for reading our community guidelines. Please read the full list of posting rules found in our site's  Terms of Service.

site categories

Louis theroux’s mindhouse behind ‘america’s new female right’ for bbc; diane guerrero cast in ‘poreless’; sarah snook project shooting; itv ‘twisted twins’ doc – global briefs, viva pictures acquires animated feature ‘hitpig’ starring jason sudeikis for november release.

By Matt Grobar

Matt Grobar

Senior Film Reporter

More Stories By Matt

• Derek Connolly Tapped To Script Sega Video Game Adaptation ‘Eternal Champions’ For Skydance 
• Osgood Perkins’ ‘Longlegs’ Crosses $100M Globally For Neon To Become Year’s Highest-Grossing Indie Release
• Range Media Partners Sets Strategic Partnership With Kenan Thompson & John Ryan Jr.’s Artists For Artists

EXCLUSIVE : Viva Pictures has acquired U.S. rights to Hitpig! , a new animated feature starring Ted Lasso ‘s Jason Sudeikis , for release in theaters nationwide on November 1. Check out a trailer for the film above.

Related Stories

Paul Schrader’s ‘Oh, Canada’ Acquired By Kino Lorber

RLJE Films & Shudder Acquire Spider One Horror Film ‘Little Bites’

Watch on deadline.

Cinzia Angelini ( Mila ) and David Feiss ( Cow & Chicken ) directed from a script by Dave Rosenbaum and Tyler Werrin ( The Lorax ), which was based on a story by Breathed. Adam Nagle ( Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank ) and Dave Rosenbaum ( Animal Farm ) produced the film, with Cinesite ( The Addams Family 2 , Iwájú ) overseeing the animation , and Isabella Summers of indie rock band Florence and the Machine penning the score.

Said Victor Elizalde, CEO of Viva Pictures, “We are delighted to see indie animation continuing on its incredible growth trajectory at the theatrical level. With HITPIG! ‘s witty humour, thrilling adventures, and a touching story about friendship and self-discovery, the title is a standout addition to our slate.”

Other upcoming releases for Viva Pictures include  200% Wolf  and  Scarygirl . VP of Acquisitions Laura Prieto negotiated the deal on behalf of the company, with Della Rosa from Aniventure repping the production.

Must Read Stories

Dems sets celebs as hosts; fox news duo on “upside down world”; how to watch, bursts to $41.5m u.s. debut, 2nd best for franchise; tops $108m global, french screen icon dies at age 88; macron leads list of tributes, ‘sunset boulevard’ director jamie lloyd has eyes on making movies, read more about:, subscribe to deadline.

Get our Breaking News Alerts and Keep your inbox happy.

No Comments

Deadline is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Deadline Hollywood, LLC. All Rights Reserved.