While PhD students don’t do exams in the traditional sense, they often will have requirements to meet during their time on the programme. One of them would be to submit some sort of report and pass a continuation viva (or whatever it is called at your institution). For me, I did a continuation report and viva at the end of my first year of the PhD at Manchester. At the time, it felt like a very big thing because it’s called a “viva”, just like the viva I would do when I defend my thesis, right? Now I have enough hindsight to say that it wasn’t as high stakes as I initially thought it to be. 

Granted, you might not be able to continue your PhD if you don’t pass this milestone but things shouldn’t have gotten that bad in the first place. Most PhD programmes have safeguards in place to prevent this from happening e.g. you meeting your supervisors regularly, presenting at lab meetings/externally, along with other requirements you have to meet e.g. submitting a literature review on your research area. 

The whole point of something like a continuation viva is to assess whether a PhD candidate is making enough progress to generate data for a thesis, and to see if any further support might be needed to make that happen. It’s also a great opportunity to practise discussing your work just like how you would when you come to defend your thesis in the viva! I found it really useful even with the nerves, because I got to talk to academics who weren’t subject experts but could still critically examine my work – outsiders to the work in a way. I got a lot of feedback on how to better present my data when it came to writing my thesis and inspiration for other things to look into as well. 

My experience

For my continuation viva, I discussed potential examiners with my supervisor before he approached them to see if they would be happy to examine me. Note: your institution may have specific requirements that you have to meet when it comes to selecting examiners.

Once my examiners were confirmed, we arranged a day and time that worked for us to meet for the viva. On the day, I did a brief presentation describing the rationale of my project and key takeaways of my work so far – this was largely based on the continuation report I submitted leading up to the viva. Then we went into discussing the project and I think the entire viva took somewhere between 2 to 3 hours. I lost track of time because I was very engrossed in the discussion and making notes of all the points that came up! It was a good experience overall and I passed, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing up my thesis now. The examiners were supportive and happy to rephrase their questions if needed, and it didn’t feel like I/my work was being attacked. 

One question that often comes up with continuation reports/vivas is whether you need to have data for it. I think it depends on your specific project. For example, you may have been spending your time on preparation for the actual work coming up e.g. getting ethics approval. If that is the case, it is usually sufficient to discuss your research plan when you are being examined. I recommend you look into this by checking with your university because there might be specific requirements for the format of your report, depending on the content going into it.

What your continuation viva looks like will depend on your examiners. For example, whether they want you to do a quick presentation at the start or if you are having the viva in-person. If you have questions, your university, supervisor and viva examiners are all there to help. It can also help to read previous continuation reports and speak to other PhD students who have already gone through the process. I think it would be really helpful to reference other PhD theses if you have data to include, to see how they discuss their results. After all, the whole process simulates what it will be like when you come to write and defend your thesis!

I hope you have found this post on PhD continuation reports and vivas helpful, let me know if there is anything specific you’d like to see! 

Until the next post, 

Jean