Viva's sample questions!

Viva questions:

1. What is the area you wish to be examined?
2. Summarise your key findings? What are your main findings?
3. What have you done that merits a PhD? What have you accomplished in your research? In one your sentence, what is your thesis?
4. Would you briefly summarise your research effort?
5. Can you highlight the major contribution that your thesis make? What have you done that merits a PhD? A PhD research is supposed to be a contribution to the literature. What is your contribution? What are the contributions (to knowledge) of your thesis? What contribution to knowledge does your PhD thesis make?
6. Who in your area of study would agree with your findings? Why? Who would disagree? Why?
7. What areas of further research did you uncover?
8. Where could you publish your findings to reach the audience that could profit from your work?
9. How did you reduce biases and prejudices?
10. What additional work you plan to undertake as a result of your study?
11. What did this exercise in research teach you?
12. How do you intend to use your findings?
13. What is original about your work? What is your original contribution?
14. How would you describe your methodology, and why did you decide to use this? Why have you done it this way?
15. How have you evaluated your work? How do you know that your approach is correct?
16. What do you think the weakness of your research methodology?
17. What are the alternatives to your approach? Looking back, what might you have done differently?
18. How did your research emerge? What are the motivations for your research? Why is this problem you tackled worth tackling?
19. You discussed further work in your conclusion chapter, who long do you think it would take to implement and what are the problems envisaged?
20. What do you plan to do next? What do you see this kind of research moving in the future, what are the openings?
21. What have you gained from your research approach? What does your result mean?
22. What have you learned from the process of doing your PhD?
23. Has your topic changed during the course of your research? How has your view on your research topic changed during the course of your research?
24. What are the three most important papers / references in your research?
25. What are the major developments in your area of study? What is the current industry state in perceiving the problem you investigated? Is your field going in the right direction?
26. Any ethical issues relating to your research?
27. How does your research contributions generalise, and to what extent it would be significant to the bigger scenario? How does your system cope with bigger examples? Are your findings likely to be found in other sectors, for example?