I've got my viva in a couple of weeks and am wondering what to do to prepare for it. I'm wondering what other people did? Reading through my thesis and the key papers doesn't seem much.

Also I'm wondering what to wear for my viva, I'm male, both my examiners are also male, I want to wear something appropriate but comfortable, any suggestions?

A friend has recommended 'How to survive your viva' by Rowena Murray which I'm about to order. Not sure I can advise on clothing as I'm female. I just bought a white shirt and grey trousers that will double for interviews and viva.

Hi there Laney, I am not at that stage, still finishing up the thesis but I went to a seminar recently on preparing for the viva. The guy giving the seminar suggested going through the thesis and summing up every page in one line, then typing this up over a couple of pages like p.1 bla bla, p.2 bla bla bla and so on. He said it helped to know what all your main points are the whole way through and also so you could whip out the couple of pages and revise quickly at any time. Also he brought it into the viva with him, so when they asked a question he could look at his 'cheat sheet' as he called it, and say "well as you can see on p.156...."

He also suggested preparing answers to a 'stock' of questions that you know will probably be asked. I think there may be a list of these in that Rowena Murray book? He said make sure you know the answers to the basics e.g. what did you do, why did you do it and so on and hopefully the rest should fall into place! I know someone recently though who prepared answers to about 100 questions and wasn't asked anything like what she expected - so I suppose stick to preparing for the basic ones that will always be asked.

I'm female by the way so not too sure on the what to wear question, but I would imagine a suit would be good or if not then at least a shirt and pants!

Good luck :-)

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good luck! great advice given below . i'm gonna try that too!

my friend advised me to summarise each chapter onto 1 A4 page. so when i am in the viva, i can quickly look at it.

but i also like the idea of summarising each page into 1 line. thats a good idea too

basically at the moment, i'm working on summarsing each chapter. and answering the basic questions. i just compiled the list of qs for each chapter this morning.
here they are:

1. Basic definitions
2. What was known before
3. What is the chapter based on
4. What was the result
5. Importance of the result
6. How was the experiment carried out (which method)
7. Limitations of the method
8. Strengths of the method
9. Future experiments

im gonna answer all these qs for each chapter.

and yah its a good idea to have an answer for the common qs of viva preperation. i made a list of questions from various different sources. namely from the murray book but also from this website

http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/cs/cs710/viva.html

good luck . i will join you in preparing for my viva. which is soon also