Well, after 6 weeks of hysterical crying fits, cronic insomnia and hours and hours of revising / thesis reading I passed my viva with minor corrections on Friday.

After reading some of the horror stories on here I was expecting my viva to last 2.5 hours minumum.

As it is, I get in there and get told that actually the external doesn't want to see my 15 minute presentation... ok, so I shut my laptop..

He completely skipped most of my contributions, didn't even *mention* chapter 5 - the in depth chapter with all my underlying theories and spends most of his time asking me to define what I think things are.. he kept looking at his watch and after 50 mins he said ' I'm done'... so my internal took over (she had pages of questions) however as she worked out the external needed to be somewhere she asked me 3 hardish questions..

I went into my 2nd supervisors office who thought there was something wrong... 55 mins mine took... I suppose I am just feeling slightly like a fraud.. all these people get grillings and I got nothing like that! Anyone else had a weird viva experience?

First of all CONGRATULATIONS!!

All it really means is that they liked it enough not to need to grill you! I've heard of quite a few of these although the shortest was 1:30 - during which the external spent a lot of time talking about his Labrador dogs - he reckoned only 45 mins contributed to the actual viva

Conversley we recently had one last 8 hours! real page by page stuff! nasty!

no need to feel like a fraud - you've passed - well done!

I hope you're pleased rather than dissappointed. Mine went surprisingly smoothly and was just under 2 hours as the examiner had to go back home
I had spent weeks (years?!) worrying and it didn't feel like I had anticipated. The examiner was nice!

My viva is in a few days, I'm really dreading it. I've been preparing over the last few weeks I'm praying it all goes ok.

I can relate to the crying fits, chrionic insomnia and hours spend doing prep.

Tiggs

I don't know if a short viva would be any good for me, I think the longer I'm there the more chance I'll relax and the better my chance of saying something coherent. Or perhaps the longer I'm in there the more I'll go to pieces?

Tiggs

Congratulations Dr.!

Wow well done on passing! congratulations. I have my viva shortly and I would love it if mine was as short as that. I presume you don't have any corrections either which is absolutley brilliant. Well done.

Congrats! I love reading about people passing!

Congratulations!

Congrats, PC! very well done!

Your thesis must have been exceptionally well written, I know someone who's wiva was only 50 mins long, he was given optional corrections!

Enjoy being a Dr.

LOL... 'No corrections', I wish! I was told it was on the edge of being minor / major as I have another chapter to write and about 200 smaller corrections e.g. typos (some of which I have already found and done) I also have 2 short sections to write in my literature review so nope, I certainly have more work to do

It still hasn't sunk in yet - all my work colleagues, family and friends are being lovely and saying 'congrats'... I'm still in shell shock... I think the 'problem' is having this huge expectation as to what it should be like and it being totally different to what I imagined!