Our Viva is the final stage of our Doctorate and can be an exhilarating challenge. But we need to be prepared; and we need some critical friends to help with that preparation, and there are only so many times we can ask our family and friends to help.

The Viva Supporters group is to help you organise yourselves within your department, your research group, your research collaboration.

We will train you how to deliver a mock viva for colleagues, sharing likely questions and practice.

We will also share our experiences from our Vivas and provide hints & tips on how to get the best from the day.

People will get a chance to practice being an examiner & examined; this allows you to see the event from the examiner's perspective as well as your own.

This is a community activity; you need to bring colleagues with you to make this work, so find others to create a community of support. These events are held in the RDOWarwick community space- an online space for all

Warwick PGRS.

You need to go to this site https://www.kumospace.com/rdowarwick

Register with your Warwick email address. You will be asked to confirm your email. This will likely go to your Junk

Folder so please check there first.

This may take about 10 minutes so worth doing in advance

How to have difficult conversations (or making sure we say what we need to)

Having a difficult conversation is not always about resolving conflict; it could be that we need to say something

that we find uncomfortable, or we want someone to listen to our point of view or that we want our voice heard. It

may also be that we need to resolve conflict. This session will help you recognise what is creating the difficulty, suggest tactics for preparing beforehand, and how to manage the actual conversation. It is also a great session to help you with future leading and managing relationships.