The 10-Minute Defense Prep That Guarantees You Pass

I want to talk about a defense, and if you give me just a few minutes here, I think we can allay some of your fears and get you ready to move forward. There's a lot of concern within the group of doctoral students in the world. Oh my God, the defense! I'm going to be, you know, having all these issues, and they're going to ask me questions, and it's going to take forever. You know, First of all, it's my opinion that you shouldn't go to a defense. Your committee shouldn't allow you to do a defense unless they're ready to pass you because they've already seen your material. They've already said it's okay. Because as a committee member, I don't want to waste my time going to a defense knowing I'm not going to approve it. I'll just give you comments and say, this has to change. Things have to be implemented in order for me to approve this. Well, I can do that in writing in my office as opposed to coming into a meeting and spending an hour listening to everybody and all that other stuff. Why don't I just tell you? So the defense should be more confirmatory and even a celebration because you've made it through. Committees are actually trying to find out— if they're probing for one thing, they want to know, is this your work? Have you actually done it? Are you comfortable with the material? It's okay to get help. It's okay to have a statistician help you. It's okay to have an editor. It's okay to have a coach. It's not okay to go into your defense and say, oh, well, I didn't do that. Dr. Jones did that. It's your dissertation. Dr. Jones's name isn't on the dissertation. Dr. Jones has already done a dissertation. They want to know that even if you had help doing it, you understand what they did. And can explain it and explain why it was done. So that's your responsibility. If you do get help, you have to be prepared to answer questions on it. And if you do get help, that person who helped you, part of the deal has to be they help you understand it as well. When you're in with a committee, there are going to be questions that look like the process type Oh, what was the hardest part? What would you do differently? What advice would you give to people? And those are great questions, and it's good reflective type questions. But the harder questions are when they ask about the methodology. Why did you, or why didn't you? And don't assume that that's an affront to what you've done. Okay, do you understand approaches, different approaches, Now tell me why you didn't use this approach and why that was the appropriate decision. And why'd you use this approach and why it's the appropriate decision? If you remember that the purpose of a dissertation is not to change the world, but it's for the committee to say, yeah, they know how to do research. Well, they're going to poke and prod and see if you know how to do one thing or if you understand why what you did fits in the whole realm of all the types of research that can be done. And if you can answer questions like that, that's when you're going to be successful. Another category of questions you're going to get are things that maybe are outside the scope of what you've done. Some can be, well, okay, how about this? And you get to say that this was outside what was approved. Now, I wouldn't just say, no, outside of what was approved. I would say, that's a really interesting question. For the boundaries of this work or the scope of this work, we were limited to this area, but in the future, it would be great to explore that. And what that means is, good question, but it's not what we did here. But I'm going to acknowledge you wrote a good question or you came up with a good question so that I acknowledge you as an individual. It's when you don't acknowledge people that they get a little antsy and a little maybe cantankerous, and that's when weird questions can arise. When you're talking about areas of your dissertation— literature review, for example— they want to know that you've covered the breadth of the literature pretty well. You're probably not going to get everything, okay? If anybody in your committee has written anything that applies to what you're doing, I'd include them. Because, you know, it's human nature. Did they cover my work? Huh, why didn't they cover my work? Just put it in there. The biggest thing they want to know is it— and in the writing and also in the discussion at a defense— have you synthesized or integrated the literature? Don't give me a book report. Show me how it all ties together. With your methodology, they're looking for and probing, why did you choose this methodology? Why didn't you choose others? Again, showing your ability to grasp approaches. And you can answer these quickly. I didn't choose this because the underlying data didn't meet these assumptions. Or I chose this because of the data we collected. It was going to allow me to answer the research questions. And that's it. They're looking, do you understand why you chose something, why you did something? Sometimes they'll ask you about limitations or delimitations. Just to make sure you understand that you can't answer everything. It's not uncommon to have a question come up that you don't understand, or maybe you don't even— can't answer. First of all, it's pretty simple or easy to have a question come up that you kind of go, oh my God, I don't know. What do I do? What's the answer? You probably do know, but you need to pause. And one of the great ways to pause is to say, I think I understand what you're asking for, but can you rephrase that? And while they're rephrasing, your brain is working. And you go, okay, got it. Great. And when they rephrase, you answer the question, but you also say, did that answer your question? Because you want to make sure you've gotten there and clarify what they're looking for. And sometimes they ask you questions you don't know the answer to, and it's okay if it's outside the realm of your study. If it's something that no one's ever thought of, you say, I don't know. That's a really good question. I don't know the answer to that. I think it would entail future study, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. It's always good to compliment people. It's always good to let them know that you think they're intelligent. Committees are looking for answers to questions. They already know you're there. They already know you've done it, but they're looking to see how well you handle something. I was on a committee once where someone asked a question. About a methodology, and the candidate really didn't know the answer why they did it, and they basically tried to bluff their way through. And you're trying to bluff your way through with, you know, a methodologist or a content expert who— they know their stuff. So bluffing with them isn't going to work, and it didn't work. This person was one of 2 people's committees that I've Served on who had to come back and redefend because they didn't show the committee a mastery of the material. And that's where you run into problems. If you just can't show that you understand what you did, or if you try to bluff your committee, they're going to know because they've been there longer than you and they've understood these things more than you do. Now, on the other hand, every once in a while that you get a new committee member come on. Somebody leaves for whatever reason, you need a new committee member. And that new committee member may ask questions that seem out of left field, but it's because they haven't had the familiarity with it. So that's when hopefully it's up to communication with your chair ahead of time so that your chair can also set boundaries for what's being asked. But always be respectful, acknowledge the question, Answer the best you can, or just say, no, I don't know, and then move forward. I had an interesting question though, and I'm going to end with this. If I had 10 minutes to prepare for my defense, what should I do? I'm just going to assume you have slides put together or something, because you're not going to be able to put slides together in 10 minutes, and almost every defense now includes some sort of PowerPoint defense. But even just to set up those slides, I need to— if it's your final defense, I need what I found and what it means, okay? And ultimately how it fits in with the rest of the literature, the previous literature. If I can do those 3 things, I'm going to be successful more often than not in a final defense. And as always, we here at Beyond PhD Coaching are out here to help you in any way we can. Just contact us. Love to talk to you.