Assalamualaikum warahmatullah,
Sebenarnya kat bawah ni adalah forwarded email dari seorang sahabat about some tips on PhD. Hope she don't mind me sharing it here. Semoga bermanfaat untuk semua.
----------------------------------------------------------------Assalamualaikum warahmatullah,
These are some valuable tips that I acquired from Dr. S.... A..... (my very gentle, religious and likeable supervisor while doing my sabatical here in Univ. of Manchester). She says when she is the examiner these are things that she will look for and that the students will usually be asked...
Has the student/Is the student:
a. done enough work?
b. done something new?
c. understood how it relates to other work published in the same and related fields?
d. explained it clearly in the thesis and be able to explain it orally during viva?
e. aware of limitations?
f. if he/she were to do it again, would he/she do it differently and why?
g. the contribution of the work (to scientific knowledge..if in related fields)..be able to sell your work to the examiners...
Actually, when I got these...I had submitted my thesis...(did mine for 8 years on a part-time basis at USM Engineering Campus), and when I looked back at my thesis while preparing for my viva....tried to fill in the blanks based on my own work.
Am glad to say that I actually did find these points in my thesis ....when I read in between the lines...though not stated as word for word.
Another tip is based from my own experience....Do more, not less.....for it is always better if the examiner feels there is a tremendous amount of work...and if they decide that you should discard certain subsections...rather than the examiners find that your work is just enough..and then they decide that you need to extend the work ...during the viva...and that really hurts....personally, would not want to carry on any more work after the viva...
For example, my field supervisor (a radiologist..specialist by profession) has asked me to evaluate the performance of the tool that was developed in my study...an aid for people in the medical field...using 2 statistical approaches usually used by people in medical field, i.e. giving the accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, false positive, false negative etc. and another the ROC curve analysis giving Area Under the Curve (AUC). These are established and standard performance tests used by people in medical field.
Tergerak hati nak cuba one more method as an addition...from an Engineering point of view and quality control...also asked around...especially statisticians...and of course, Dr. Z..... who is the statistical expert in the department, came into the picture.....she recommended the DOE (Design of Experiments method....Randomized Complete Block Design and Analysis of Variants ANOVA)...Residual Analysis (using Minitab software)...to prove that that the performance of the system developed is at par with the experts and also the data collection was valid..i.e. random and acceptable...graphs show these...you as researcher cannot lie, because it will surely show in the graph plots.....based on your results...so I guess, that helped to highlight and emphasis point (g).
And also the reason why the viva was a breeze and lasted for only 45 minutes...Alhamdulillah...
Hope you will find these very useful....
Semoga Allah permudahkan juga segalanya nanti for yo too....Amin...
Janganlah lupa solat hajat setiap malam sepanjang study...sebelum viva......hanya kepadaNya saja tempat kita mengadu dan hanya kepadaNyalah saja tempat kita berharap (makna Surah Al Fatihah).....Allah akan perkenankan, Insya Allah...
Wasalamualaikum
Best of Luck!
Dr. Umi Kalthum Ngah
