Hello all,

My viva is on 30 of this month. I have to preparea a presentation for 15min. I don't have to prepare slidshows. What are the main points I should talk about? Is it a summary of the main conclusions?

I read online that I should talk about the methodology! What does it mean? My thesis is on human rights. It studies and compares the case-law of two courts in a certain context..

Hi emaa,

I also had to give a presentation ( i prepared a powerpoint with bullet points). I started with two very general slides (why is the topic important, and timeliness of research). Then one slide about the aims, followed by originality novelty and contribution to knowledge. Then I talked about the methodology- very fast just a flow diagramme (my methodology was two big chapters, so I had to just mention the basic things I did). I concluded with two slides on main findings and implications. My PhD was super-duper multidisciplinary, so I am not sure how I would describe my area, possibly social science? Maybe someone from your discipline can give better advice.

My PhD was in mathematics with applications to medical imaging. My presentation was done in LaTeX and the basic structure of the talk was
1) Introduce the broad field. Then for 4 particular topics:
2) Introduce a particular subject and why it's worth looking at
3) What are the issues and why do they matter
4) What others have done about it
5) What I've done about it and why it's better

I expected mine to be 25-30 minutes of presenting followed by a discussion about the thesis. In fact, the panel asked almost all of their thesis-questions during the presentation, which ultimately took 2 hours, followed by some brief questions and passing without corrections :). It could be different in your field, but in my mine, some important things were highlighting the importance of the research area, talking about what others had done, and very importantly, emphasizing the novelty and significance of my research. A friend told me that, in his VIVA, he finished his talk and sat down at the table, only for the external to ask, "So, what's actually new in this thesis?"

Hi Emma
I think you should tell about human rights properly so that audience can understand easily and just add those topics which are essential because presentation should be short and understandable, make sure that you can connect your audience with your presentation.
And also prepare for the cross questions about your topic.

Good luck for your presentation session :)

Hello, many thanks for your replies. I am still working on the my Viva presentation. This is my plan:

- thanks for the jury 30 sec
- practical importance of the topic
- the definition of the principle I studied
- the case- law I worked on and the number of cases against Switzerland (where I am doing my PhD)
- the objects of the study
- main findings
- recommendations
- up to date information, mentioned the judgements that were delivered after I submitted my thesis 1min

Any advice? I am still not know what to talk about methodology. Is it enough to mention thay I mainly relied on the interpretation of the principle by the case-law of two treaty bodies. I compare between their related case-law to define which of them provide better protection and to what extent there is an interaction between these two bodies.

My viva after 17 days and I submitted my thesis since December. A friend suggested to make mock viva. I sent him the introduction and the conclusion. Today, he sent me the text with lot of silly typing mistakes and wrote that if you want to dicuss them feel free to call me. The result is that I am too sad and disappointed.

Hi Emaa,

Try not worry about it too much. A friend of mine submitted her thesis in a huge hurry because she was told she had to either submit or pay another year's (international student) fees. After she'd submitted she found lots of typos and other errors, but she still passed her viva with minor corrections. If your examiners are not native speakers of English, they will hopefully not notice some of the mistakes anyway.

Thank you Aisling. what really annoyed me is that the proofreader was a doctor in English literature and she is a proofreader of another university jornal. She was really expensive. I thought I did my best to avoide the typos.

I see why you'd be upset if you paid someone to do the proof reading. Are you sure your friend's corrections are actually correct though? I've seen some pretty terrible 'proof reading' by people who are trying to help out a friend, but who unfortunately know very little about syntax and punctuation.

In fact, I don't know whether or not my friend's corrections are right? Most of them is missing 'the'. He is Canadian and the proofreader is American, I don't know if this is the reason.

Maybe they are both right some of the time! In some cases you have to use 'the', in others there is a slight change in meaning if you put it in, and occasionally it doesn't really matter whether it's there or not.

Many thanks Aisling. I asked my superviser about those typos. She told me don't worry about them because even if the jury noticed them, they would not mention that in the defence. That seems good