Preparing for your 'dreaded' VIVA
Preparation time Preparing for your Viva (pronounced ViyVa, and not VeeVa like the 'Up your Viva' advert from a few years back) can seem like a really daunting task, but some great advice that I got from one of my supervisors was that " YOU ARE the specialist of your own topic, you have lived and breathed this research and you know why you made every decision that you did, so do not worry because in that room, you are the expert of your own research and they are only there to double check that, and ask questions in order to clarify this." She was exactly correct. At my Viva I found that they asked questions relative to 'why did you use this approach?', 'why did you use/not use this instead?' The most helpful steps I found when preparing for my Viva was by sitting down and asking myself these types of questions (see section Order of questions for some examples), remembering back to meetings which I had arranged to thoroughly debate these topi
