This week, it is time for another “doctoral diary”. For my new readers, this is where I invite guests who are current PhD students or early career researchers. They provide insights into a PhD-related topic personal to them. Read about another doctoral diary here on how to strike a balance between personal life and PhD.
I connected with Emily Beswick, via LinkedIn. Emily was kind enough to collaborate and create something meaningful for my readers.
Emily is an early career researcher in Ireland. She is here to share valuable insights into how to prepare for PhD dissertation or viva. Dissertation is the culmination of your PhD and I would assume that it is ideally the first project that you get to choose making it a very personal experience.
PhD students often feel stuck or lost while writing thesis because of reasons like the lack of resources or mentorship available, writing not being their strongest skills, being overwhelmed by the material, and more. Emily has already been through the grind. In this guest blog, she discusses some foundational steps to guide you through writing your thesis and finish strong at the end of your PhD.
Read, read, and read it again!
Take the time to read your thesis with ‘fresh’ eyes. For me, this meant printing a physical copy with text on one side so I could make notes on the opposite page. But, this can look different for everyone. For example, if you prefer reviewing a soft copy rather than a physical one, that is fine.
You can make notes and comments to yourself while you review. Use colored highlights for sections that you’d like to revisit ad modify. There is no right way to approach this. However, the intention is to read your own work with a fresh perspective. Opening the document in a new software, changing the font face, or printing it out enables you to really read what is on the page and distil the key points into your own notes.
Know your audience
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Find out as much as you can about your examiners or dissertation committee. What are their research interests and how do they align with your thesis? You cannot predict their questions, but you can predict areas of their interest and might want to discuss in more detail.
Reading about their current work.
Looking over past publications
Talking to colleagues and considering their social media presence.
These can go a long way in helping you understand the types of discussions that you might have. Another efficient way to gauge their interests is meeting with them ahead of your dissertation defense. So, you can be prepared to address those topics in your PhD viva.
Prepare your elevator pitch
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Be sure to prepare and summarize your entire PhD dissertation in a two-minute elevator-pitch style; making it accessible to understand and engaging to follow. Focus on what your work adds to scientific knowledge and why this gap is important to address.
This is an opportunity to take a breath, break the ice and highlight what you think is key for the examiners to know and will likely be one of the first parts of the viva discussion. Along with addressing the importance of the research gap, you ideally need to prepare for answering what would be the next steps or what do you recommend for future researchers?
Your PhD thesis identified and addressed a research gap, but the audience generally wonders what are the key take-home messages? What you will do to address the gaps, if given a chance? You can create an ancillary slide to demonstrate different directions that your research can take.
Redo literature reviews
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If you have any systematic reviews as a part of your PhD dissertation, or aspects of your introduction that particularly focus on cutting-edge aspects of your research area, re-run the literature searches. Check if there is any new published literature or preprints that might be relevant and could potentially come up in discussion.
You can never read every new paper that there ever was or will be. But, reading at least the abstract of the most recent contributions to the field will help you feel more prepared for a discussion.
Emphasize what you did differently to these other researchers?
How this new knowledge links to your own work?
Think about what was missing in those studies and how your study stands out?
It doesn’t have to be groundbreaking. But, it has to be relevant to the field of research. As a PhD student, YOU know your thesis topic the most as no one but you has spent months reading and preparing for it. Therefore, be sure to truly know it inside out and state the “unknowns” up front.
Background questions
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A lot of the PhD viva is discussing your thesis in context, considering what your findings add, and why you did what you did. I found these questions from Twitter to be helpful in thinking about what my thesis added. Preparing short responses beforehand to these can make you think deeper about the ‘why’.
This can be particularly helpful for lab-based PhDs that can be less obvious in their clinical impact, and their future importance needs to be contextualized in the present.
- What motivated you to carry out this research?
- What issue in society does your research address?
- Why did you use your research methodology?
- What are the three most important papers that relate to your thesis?
- What published work is closest to yours and why is yours different?
- To what extent do your contributions generalize?
- What are the most recent developments in your area?
- What are the contributions to knowledge of your thesis?
- What are the strongest and weakest parts of your work?
Acknowledge but accept your studies’ limitations
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Think critically about the methods you used and consider why you used them. You can do this by focusing on the limitations sections that you have written for each chapter. However, remember that these were written at the chronological end of each study.
Be confident in your decisions and acknowledge that you made the decision at that time for a reason. With the beauty of hindsight, there might be decisions that you would change, or alternative methods that you would have used. But, instead of focusing on what you would have done differently, consider why it was the right decision with the information you had at the time.
Remember, your committee does not expect you to execute a perfect study. But, they do expect you to justify each and every method that you decided to use. Justification is a big part of conducting science as the current research is always informed or justified by the previous literature, gaps, and methodologies. So, acknowledging limitations and what you would do differently is important to address.
Revise the techniques that you used
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For lab-based PhDs, this will likely mean reviewing the methods/techniques that you used, ensuring that you are comfortable explaining them, particularly those which are more unusual and novel. The committee will likely discuss this at the defense. Consider why you used those over more standard protocols, and how you interpreted the findings.
For behavioral or public health PhDs, this may be particularly focused around the statistical analysis techniques that you used to analyze your data or whether self-reported or observational methods were used. Focus on being able to summarize and justify these succinctly and in context of your own work.
For PhDs like my own that used standardized clinical rating scales, an understanding of the scales themselves can be helpful to revise and refresh. The number of items, concepts evaluated and why this scale was chosen over those with similar aims.
But, most crucial of all…
Enjoy it! Many people gave me that advice before my PhD viva and I thought that they were completely missing the mark. But, I really did enjoy it. You will have worked so hard to write the thesis, revise and edit endless drafts, and it can be quite isolating at times to get through the final push.
So, the viva is a chance to talk about what you have done with people who are interested to know. It is a great opportunity to just enjoy talking about something that you are incredibly passionate about, with people who are also passionate about this niche topic, and a really fun finale to years of hard work.
Good luck with your thesis preparation and if you would like to connect with me, LinkedIn is the place to go.
Emily Beswick, over to Divya.
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If you are wondering what skills I will take away from my PhD other than my research expertise, here are 5 transferable skills to add to your resume NOW.
Featured photo for this blog- Photo by Dan Dimmock on Unsplash