Tips on how to prepare for a project viva

The word Viva is very scary for everyone, and there is no one formula of how best to prepare for it. But here are a few tips that helped me to go through it successfully at 31 weeks pregnant.

A. SUMMARIZE THE Project in SMALLER BLOCKS COVERING THE FOLLOWING:

· What you have done;

· Why you have done it;

· How you did it;

· What you have found;

· What the implications are.

B. SUMMARIZE THE project CHAPTER BY CHAPTER

· Make sure that each chapter covers only one page, this will make it easy for you should you require to have a quick look at a chapter during the viva. This will also make it easy for you to revise your project in the shortest time possible prior to your viva.

C. POSSIBLE VIVA QUESTIONS: WRITE THE ANSWERS DOWN FOR EACH QUESTION

1. Can you tell us how you came to choose this topic for your project? Or how did your topic emerge?

2. What made you interested in doing it? Why do you think it’s important?

3. Why have you defined the topic in the way you did?

4. What were some of the difficulties you encountered and did they influence how the topic was framed?

5. What did you enjoy most about your work?

6. What would you do differently if you were starting out all over again?

7. How did your Personal Development Planning or skills training influence your work?

8. Describe the rationale of your project?

9. What are the key findings/major contributions of your project?

10. What is its position in relation to the current state of knowledge in your area?

11. Why have you chosen to organize your project into these stages/chapters?

12. Is it possible to draw a general rule from your single observations?

13. How have you evaluated your work?

14. How do you know that your findings are correct?

15. How do your findings relate to the critical literature in this field of studies?

16. What is original in your project?

17. Did you have choices to make, for example, in choosing the data collection methods, or in analyzing the data? Can you justify what you did? Or why did you choose this method to analyze your topic?

18. Describe your methodological approach/ or what are the core methods used in this project? Why did you choose this approach? In an ideal world, are there different techniques you would have liked to use?

19. What have you learned by carrying out your Project?

20. What do you know about the history of this particular aspect of your project?

21. What are the recent major developments in this topic?

22. How do you expect the research in your field to progress over the next few years?

23. Which propositions would you say are distinctively your own?

24. What are the main sources or kinds of evidence? Are they strong enough to sustain the conclusions you draw?

25. How do your findings fit with or contradict the rest of the literature in this field