Thesis submission to viva

I have been pretty much silent on this blog lately.

From the summer, a lot have happened. This included: my thesis being submitted, resumed teaching activity, the viva date being confirmed, then postponed, and finally, passing the viva.

Here are rough long summary of how it went down.

---

Thesis writing

After the last update, back in August, I pushed very hard in writing. To push myself harder, I was publishing thesis word count, which was being updated twice a day to keep my progress in check.

This was quite effective at times, especially towards the end of the day. I’d take a quick look at this and if I have not written enough (which happened more often than I would like to admit), I’d actively look for easy things I could add to the thesis. This lead to a good few hundreds of words each time. Obviously there would be a point this did not easily happen. So, I focused on the editing and deciding what to do (what to add, how to arrange them, what to remove, rephrasing badly phrased sentences) in the earlier part of the day. Latter part of the day then was spent on actually executing them.

I spent the entire summer on this and while it felt like forever, it went by rather quickly, partially due to my rather slow writing.

As the much-more-open and closer–to-normal new academic year started, my friends who were also closer to submission began submitting theirs. This was somewhat of an encouragement but also provided some sense of urgency too. I kept my head down and kept on writing. By this point, if anything, I learnt how important routines were. Sleeping early allowed earlier start, earlier start felt like it gave more time. But if I took advantage of it too much and ignored my fatigue, I was right back in late-morning start routine.

As I went on, more of the structure of the thesis became clearer; chapter naming became a bit more concrete. Around eight weeks before the actual end-date on my student record, my supervisor proposed that I declare my intention to submit. Obviously, at that point, it was far from complete. But, I went with my supervisor’s advice — I declared my intent to submit to the university. Now, there was really not much of a way to turning back, I had to get it in by the four-week window that I declared.

From that point on, it was a constant battle of me looking for a hole in the text and filling them in, while also combatting the numb-ness that comes from reading the same piece of text (or a big slab of papers perhaps, given the thickness). The hole kept appearing (or rather, became more apparent) as I read again after I thought I filled them in. Obviously, my supervisor helped me find which was the most critical of them to keep me focused.

Just as we entered this four-week window of thesis submission, in one of the meetings, my supervisor said something along the lines of ‘if you submitted this, as-is, you will have a very difficult viva, but you will pass’. While I would have kept going without told so, this certainly changed the mood, as you can perhaps imagine. While there were obviously tons of work to do, it was certainly nice knowing that I had something going. In this very meeting, we have also decided that I attempt my submission week before the actual end of the submission window, in case we ever find anything alarming that required significant amount of work.

Around that point, my dear friend, and my partner, Asta spent her time after work to help me edit the text. As I fill the, less-pressing holes in the text, chapter by chapter, I sent them to her. We spent a good chunk of time going back and forth dealing with style decisions as I also frantically tidied up my terrible grammatical mistakes.

Post submission — 19/10/2022

Before I knew it, the day came. Well, actually, the first attempt ended with me saying “maybe I could just spend, just one more day to tidy up”, to which, my supervisor kindly agreed and set the meeting slot for the very next day. I still remember feeling quite a lot of adrenaline as I came back to the office the next day. Still frantically going through the text.

By that point, I thought I was aware of how to submit. And I went off and submitted using the online form that was provided on the moodle^[1]a free open source ‘learning management system’ portal. They had a ‘moodle course’ set up specifically for this^[2]This, is one of the many things I don’t like about moodle, but I digress. I somehow knew this, so I logged on and after a few back and forth with my supervisor, the upload button was pressed, and I received an email receipt. After a word of congratulations from my supervisor, I went off to the pub.

If you think this was, indeed, a simple one push button process, you are not entirely wrong, but not entirely correct.
In the process of declaring intent to submit, an email was also sent out with instructions to generate the preambles of the thesis, which is placed at the beginning of the thesis declaring length, signature, copyright etc. I somehow also knew where in the moodle I had to submit. One thing I did not know was that in the main University website also had a bit of instructions about submission. I completely disregarded this in the upload phase. Thankfully, the mistake was nothing major and the registry responded rather swiftly, but that gave me a huge amount of anxiety. The actual mistake was that I forgot to set the right filename and had forgotten that it was the registry who would ask my supervisor’s signature (but I’ve already gotten the signature).

After this ups and downs, my thesis submission was indeed confirmed by the registry, and my thesis submission for examination was finally complete.

I spent the next two weeks doing practically nothing.

Waiting for the viva and resuming teaching

It is all well and good to have the thesis submitted, the PhD journey does not end there. There is a process called a viva voce, an oral examination. The process of the viva varies from country to country, and in some ways, institution to institution. In the UK, the viva usually consists of two examiners, one internal and one external. In some occasion/institution, there may be an internal coordinator who coordinates and occasionally help mediate the viva.

Now that the thesis was handed in, they were now sent to the examiners. And it was up to them to decide 1. what to do with me and my thesis, and 2. when they wanted to hold the viva. This could take up to 3 months (in my case, more…). Depending on the viva result, this is usually followed by some sort of corrections. Once the corrected thesis is handed in and approved by the examiner, the final copy is printed, hard-bound, then submitted. Only after that, the PhD is officially complete and I am officially a ‘doctor’.

After the submission, as I waited for my viva, I began working as a research assistant for my supervisor, part-time. This, also coincided with resuming teaching activities. I took up series of markings.

Initially, getting back to marking was rather ‘rough’. It took longer than usual, had more queries regarding marks than I ever did. Perhaps I was still exhibiting burn-out. But before I knew it, the semester ended, I continued my work as a research assistant and the Christmas came.

After the Christmas another month of the research assistant work had continued, and the teaching resumed. This time, I took on two tutorial groups and lab demonstration. And for the first time I was doing an in-person teaching since the pandemic had started.

The viva day — 7/03/2022

Leading up to the viva day was quite eventful. My viva was postponed twice due to various issues. This lead to my friends, who planned the surprise celebration visit. to pivot their visit to be a pre-viva cheering visit.

After almost four months from the submission, my viva finally happened. Due to the pandemic, mine happened online.
I nervously joined the Microsoft teams meeting and I did my best to address various points the examiners wanted to discuss. After just over two hours, I was told to leave the meeting and wait to be called back in.

After taking few sips of water, and catching breath after a long discussion, I was called back in. Thankfully, the examiners were happy with the thesis, and my responses during the viva, I was given a pass with minor correction. Essentially, once I submit my corrected thesis, and once my internal examiner approves it, I will officially be a doctor.

The moment I was congratulated and left the meeting, I felt like a heavy weight has been lifted off my shoulder. At the same time, I felt quite surreal. It felt surreal that I had spent 5 years since the start of my PhD, and wrote a ~200 page thesis.

I spend the rest of the day mostly relaxing, and celebrating. Had a rather nice dinner out and had drinks with friends. (Friends showed up with a bottle of Prosecco!) Around 23:00, I had the sudden realisation that I had a 9:00 tutorial the very next day. I was snapped back into reality and the next morning, I ended up doing a light jog to the School of Computer Science building.

Now, I’m looking/applying to jobs. Both postdoc and industry positions in the UK. And before I know it, the semester has ended! (But marking has not…)

As I look for the job, I am continuing with my corrections, which ended up including addition of text and some minor data collection and processing. Seems juggling of responsibility and tasks never end.