deliberately misrepresented or caricatured my argument - ensure you stick up for yourself!
remember that although you need to be intellectually rigorous, you also need to submit a document (the thesis) within a reasonable amount of time - saying "that wasn't possible in the time I had" is a perfectly legitimate answer!
remember YOU gathered the data, not them - quite a few times I had to just keep repeating "you may believe that to be the case, but that wasn't what I observed" until they left me alone
It's true that they want to test how much you know and to do that they ask questions you don't, or couldn't, know the answer to. At one point I started to answer a question and half way through realised I actually meant the exact opposite of what I was saying - I admitted this and the external simply said "yes, it's a difficult issue, I don't know how to answer it either".

I really hope I'm not making this sound scary - it certainly wasn't easy, but they were so encouraging, generous and understanding. And I think if I had had an easy ride I would have felt a bit ripped off, after all, it is meant to be an examination. Also, the time flies by - it felt like I'd only been in there half an hour.


Hope this helps,
Heifer

What a lovely thread! Many congratulations!

Congratulations. I will have my viva in December, although am doing biomedical sciences but, thanks for writing down your detailed viva, good to hear positive things.
all the best

Many congratulations Heifer and thanks for posting such a motivating thread and how your experience went. Many of the things you describe I am going through now so I am grateful for your post and best of luck for your future.

Hi Heifer

Congratulations! Thank you for your detailed description of the viva, really useful! Best of luck in whatever you move on to next. Well done you!

Congratulations on your pass! No corrections is amazing - Well Done!!
xxx

congratulations Heifer!

Aaaah! Thank you so much Heiffer, it does mean a lot to know that the mountain we face is not beyond us. CONGRATULATIONS and well done, that's wonderful news.

Congratulations!!! And thanks for the description of your viva.

Congratulations, no corrections!! (up):-)

Congratulations Heifer!!!! Thank you for putting down your detailed viva questions, very helpful indeed.

Just a quick update - I had to email the internal examiner yesterday about a reference and during the email exchange I admitted I thought he hated my work (because of the tone he took in the viva). He replied that he only asked such difficult questions because he thought that I could take it, and that it in no way reflected the way he felt about the thesis. So the moral is, difficult questions can be a good sign...I think :-)

thank you all again for the congratulations, it means such a lot to me and I think it's amazing how all these people who have never met can make up such a great community.

Heifer, Congratulations!! This is the first time I've heard of someone passing with NO CORRECTIONS! Thanks for taking the time to share details of the viva, I'm sure it's the last thing you wanted to think about but its so helpful for the rest of us :-)

Congratulations!

And thankyou for putting up a viva good news story :-). it's an andidote to all the horror stories i can't help reading about online! I've got mine tomorrow morning and I'm in a daze, can't seem to concentrate on anything. I'm staying in a crap hotel because I live too far from the uni to guarantee getting there on time which isn't helping either.

Anyway, I hpe I can put up my own good news story tomorrow afternoon,

Vpyeryod