Readers with good memories will recall the revelation of the snake fight part of your PhD defence, but a number of PhD students are now learning to express their theses in the form of dance.

Unlike the snake defence, which possibly might not be completely accurate, this actually exists. If you’ve ever thought to yourself ‘I wonder how someone might express Mechanisms for Maintaining Ploidy in Somatic Cells in the form of rhthymic movement’, then you’ve come to the right place.

[Thanks again to Val for the link/]

When you complete your PhD thesis, you have to complete what is called the ‘defence’ of your thesis. This is also sometimes called the ‘viva’. This is where specialists in your field of study who have read your thesis ask you a series of questions to ensure that your argument is both your own and suitably solid. A PhD thesis must be a significant contribution to its field of study, and these people are there to ensure that this is true.

However, many people have been taken by surprise the snake fight part of your thesis defence. As explained clearly in this informative page, the stronger your thesis the smaller the snake that you must defeat in combat. All people with PhDs have done this but many do not speak of it, usually due to feeling that this is an old-fashioned tradition that they would rather not speak about. Check out the link for more information. Personally I can only suggest that you wear very think gloves and a sturdy pair of boots.

[Thanks to Val for the link.]

I was asked today by a friend who is studying about how to get homework done. There are loads of tips that will help, but here are my biggest ones:

Tip 1: Get into a routine of doing your homework regularly
Spend an hour doing it immediately when you get home from school/college. There’s usually rubbish on the television at that time anyway! When I was sixteen I used to always work hard for an hour when I got home and kept well ahead of all my home work. These days I make my lunch for the next day and then go an do some exercise – learning to set beneficial routines makes your life and work a lot easier in the long run.

Tip 2: Turn off the internet connection and use books for your references
Don’t ever check your email while you are in your set study period. Turn off your messanger software. Don’t check facebook, myspace etc. Don’t even stream music you’re unfamiliar with. Don’t reply to text messages. No-one will be sending you anything so important that it can’t wait an hour for a response. Get rid of all distractions and force yourself to work every. single day. Whether you want to or not, get your work done. Set yourself realistic and useful targets and don’t stop until you’ve achieved them. Do all this and you’ll find it a lot easier to get the grades you want.

If it’s really impossible to get away from distractions then try working in the school/college library. They’re usually open for at least an hour after school.

Tip 3: Get ‘studying music’
This is a personal favourite of mine – whenever I have to work hard I’ve got an album I listen to which I know helps me focus. Find something with no lyrics that you can basically ignore very easily, because lyrics tend to distract you from what you’re trying to write. There are loads of good electronica albums out there, so I’m sure there will be ones that you’ll like. As a starter, try Lifeforms and Dead Cities by Future Sound Of London, Amber by Autechre, Takk by Sigur Ross (unless you’re Icelandic and will sing along!), or anything by Global Communications (all the albums are superb studying music).

Tip 4: Follow my other essay and exam tips!
Learn to organise your ideas – the way that they come to you the first time isn’t always the best order to make your argument. More tips on organising ideas for essay, dissertation, or PhD thesis here.

When you need to write under pressure then you need my top exam tips. They helped me for many years and really work, even if you’re just trying to write your homework.

This advice works no matter what level you are studying at, from school up to finishing a doctoral thesis. If you have any questions then add a comment and I’ll do what I can to help!

I had my PhD viva yesterday. This is where a couple of specialists in related fields to your area of study ask you questions about your thesis, sometimes it’s called an oral exam (but that sounds like a trip to the dentist) or an oral defence (anti-bacterial toothpaste?). It’s about as close to an exam as a PhD person gets. I wasn’t really nervous, because you don’t study something for this long without feeling comfortable with talking about it, but it was a big step in the final stages and there was a sense of excitement around it.

So how did I do? Not bad at all. I’ve got a ‘Pass, but…’ where the ‘but’ means that they would like me to make some changes. As half-expected, they would like me to change my referencing system. I could’ve sworn that I had stuck to the MHRA style guide all the way through, but apparently not. Still, that’s not so bad, it’ll just be really laborious. More demanding will be the literature review section that they want me to add to the end of the introduction chapter. They feel that there are a couple of people whose work should have been mentioned but wasn’t. I need to put a brief discussion of what they’ve said into the thesis and then it’s done! They’ve told me, in very definite terms, not to change any of the later chapters, no matter how tempting it may be to include the new people’s ideas.

What this boils down to is some repetitive work, some reading, and three or four thousand new words to be added in one chunk, none of which should be too difficult at all.

They were very happy with my answers to their questions; they felt that they had given me quite a hard time, but I only really had any trouble with one question.

So, what have I learnt about viva techniques?

I really enjoyed my viva, even though it was sometimes quite challenging. Now it’s just the final few things to put in place, and I’m done. Hooray!

A friend on my mailing list has emailed me to say ‘Congratulations. You have finally snatched the pebble from your master’s hand, grasshopper.’ I’ve not quite snatched it yet, there’s the viva to do yet (a one hour spoken-exam with a committee of people who know about my field of study), but it’s so close I can almost feel the leather patches attaching themselves to the elbows of my jackets.

He also sent me a link to a comic about PhDs and I felt a definite pang of recognition to this one. I don’t know what it’s like in the US, but in the UK getting a PhD actually lowers your lifetime earning potential because no-one wants to employ someone who is (on paper at least) smarter than them. It makes you question why you do it really, but then you just remember that it’s the intellectual equivalent of rock-climbing and you fall into the mantra of ‘because it’s there’ until it all goes away.

And so, the real looming question is ‘what next?’ and that’s something I just don’t know the answer to. I’ve recently experimented with a ‘normal’ job, and I was utterly miserable, which leaves the comparative poverty of self-employment, my current mish-mash of temp work and freelance web-design, or trying a radical change of occupations. To say the very least, this is a stressful time, and taking a viva seems like the least of it.

One of the things about writing a thesis is that you become the world specialist in your subject, so talking to people about it is pretty easy. You just have to remember that while they are very intelligent people, so their questions should not be dismissed, in this field you know more. From that basis you can answer anything. Well… That’s the theory.

Going back into a working environment has shown me an unexpected side effect of my studies. I now see the world in an unexpected light, somehow tangential to the way that other people seem to see it, and with this comes a strange sense of loneliness. Would I do it all again? Yes. Would I recommend it to other people? That’s definitely a more difficult question.

As you may know, my thesis is about the author William Gibson. He invented the term ‘cyberspace’ and now wishes that everyone would shut up about that and read his new stuff.

Anyway, if you ever wondered what William Gibson was like before he was famous, here’s some footage of him in 1968. Now, I understand that this won’t be exciting for very many people, but I found it quite amusing to see Gibson in his dropout stoner days and to spot the occasional seeds of what he became ten years later when he started writing short stories:

Sex doesn’t really have any importance attached to it. I think it’s really not differentiated from eating or sleeping or breathing.

Here you’ve got the beginnings of a post-modern attitude to sexual activity, where the whole body and all actions available to it become placed on an equal level.

Do you see God when you take LSD?

Do Gibson’s characters see God when they go into cyberspace?

On the other hand, it’s also pretty similar to a lot of the waffle spoken by other hippies at the time, so perhaps what is stranger is that he managed to turn it all into something that really did shape a new direction for western culture.

It’s 1:04am and I finished my thesis at 7:30pm yesterday evening. I’m now slightly tipsy.

This is not copy editted, and one chapter hasn’t been approaved by my tutors, but the thesis is done and I’m happy with it. No doubt it will probably need a little tweak here and there, but essentially the majority of the whole shebang is over. Hurrah!

Today I finished the first full draft of my PhD thesis. 61,602 words of decent insight and occasional wisdom about the works of the author William Gibson. The first chapter still needs a fair bit of editing, and the conclusion needs a few tweaks, but for the most part it’s done. A friend of mine has kindly agreed to copy edit the whole thing for me (thanks Amelia, if you’re reading this!) but it’ll take me a couple of weeks to get it all polished enough to hand over to her.

One of the things that I need to change is the title of the piece. Originally I proposed a thesis called ‘The Gendering of Cyberspace: Gender, Identity, and Sexuality in the works of William Gibson’, but in the six years since I came up with that subject I’ve realised that in his books he doesn’t actually care that much about gender and sexuality, instead he’s got a lot of interest in identity and a couple of related topics. When you’re writing a PhD, you can change the title right up until the point where you hand it in, as long as it stays in a related field. Of course, changing this does mean that I’ll need to occasionally refocus a phrase here-and-there in the thesis, but I’m changing the title better reflect the thesis so the refocussing should be pretty painless.

I’m sticking with issues of identity, but I’ve gone down a slightly different path. I don’t want to say much more about the choice that I’ve made at the moment due to the remote (but just about possible) chance that an academic might pinch it before I’m examined. I’m considering making a chapter available on my site for anyone who’s interested when it’s done, but I will likely be trying to get the thesis published as a book so I wouldn’t want to give everything away!

Anyway, merry Christmas to me, I’ve given myself the thesis that I’ve been promising myself for many years.

Season’s best wishes to you all too. ‘Hope you have a great Christmas, those of you who celebrate it. I’ll probably be taking a little break from blogging for a few days, so I’ll see you on the other side. Ho ho ho, and to all a good night!