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Viva today

Today I find out whether I get a PhD. I've been strangely not-nervous about it, although I've woken up pretty early this morning. It's difficult to `revise' since most of what we'll be talking about is what I wrote. I've been trying to refresh my memory of papers I cited (especially those of my examiners...) and of what I wrote, but it's been so boring I haven't done much. Let's hope I don't regret it later.

I'm fairly hopeful about passing - I would hope my supervisors would not have let me submit if it wasn't going to pass, but I see the viva as being both a rite of passage everyone has to go through (i.e. a horrible experience that my examiners had to go through, so they want to inflict it on me, and a negotiation process about how many corrections I need to do.

I'm not worried about having a hard time today: I tend to stand up reasonably well under face-to-face pressure like this, and I hope I can robustly defend points of which I am confident, and give way in places where I should refine my thinking. I'm more worried about the corrections. I just can't imagine getting back into writing my thesis - I've left it so far behind my thinking, I'm so sick of it, that the idea of writing another chapter or two is horrific. It was bad enough the first time.

Originally posted at 2005-06-20 11:56:56+00:00. Automatically generated from the original post : apologies for the errors introduced.

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