Before I launch into the story of my viva, I first need to tell you the story of a young, socially awkward girl…which was who I was about twenty years ago.
At the age of 12, three days after completing my primary school UPSR exams, my family and I boarded the flight to move 10,560km away to the UK. I had to say goodbye to all my friends and honestly, back then, the only way to stay in touch with anyone was via Yahoo Messenger or email. No thirteen-year-old, at least within my circle, was doing any of that, so I stepped on UK soil pretty friendless. I was registered to join a public school for high school, and as a Muslim girl, I did not exactly experience the most open of welcomes among the students there, at least initially. In fact, I was bullied quite a lot in the beginning.
Where friendships was concerned, the only thing I was really able to do was take myself online. I joined a lot of message boards and it was around this time also that I started to really enjoy writing stories. I’d post stories on a couple of websites, get reviews, and join some online writing groups. This was also the age where I began dabbling into graphics design and CSS coding for website building. I’d learn all the software back then. Paint Shop Pro, COREL Draw, Adobe Photoshop. To this day, I am thankful to my 13-year-old self for having self-taught myself these skills and pursued these hobbies.
But I digress.
During the first few months of high school, I was taught separately from everyone else, probably because they wanted to test where I was academically before integrating me into mainstream classes. I haaated this, as there was only three or four of us working with a teacher at a time, who would normally just give work and then wander off. I didn’t have the opportunity to make any real friends these early few months, so the online world became an escape.
I ended up developing a close, lifelong friendship with a girl named Emily, from the US, along with a few others. Emily was two years older than me, and was homeschooled, so she was often online at the oddest of USA hours…which worked out well for our friendship, because she would be constantly online when I come home from school. Daily, as soon as I got home, I would log online and chat the afternoon and night away with Emily and our mutual friends. I’d write stories, design webpages and graphics, and talk to her about anything and everything.
Emily never minded my being a Muslim, which was HUGE for such an insecure 13-year-old like me who was bullied and called terrible names at school. At school, I would keep my head down and study while students chuck paper balls and pens at my back (note: I did get my revenge on them in the end, but that’s a story for another day). I’d please the teachers and help them tidy the classroom because I didn’t want to hang around at the corridors. Rather than have lunch at the dining hall, I’d go and seek shelter at the school library during our one-hour lunch break (which ended up becoming the most life-changing place for me in my adolescence—again, another story for another day). And as soon as the final school bell rang at 3.30PM, I’d walk the 2.5km route home.
Don’t get me wrong, I did develop wonderful friendships in the UK in my four years of life there. I even made friends who I would literally call my soulmates, to this day. And it’s the one place that I feel I owe everything to who I am today. But that came later—much later. In that first year of high school, life was tough. As soon as I get on my laptop, however, I’d heave a sigh of relief. Because online, I could be anyone. I could be cool and write wonderful stories and design really nice webpages. I’d ask Emily what she was up to, listen to her complain about her school work, she’d introduce me to the world of music and anime, and we’d chat away until the night.
This friendship lasted…until today, almost two decades later. In fact, when I got married in Malaysia in 2016, Emily and her then-boyfriend Chris, who she later married, boarded a 28-hour flight and travel the crazy distance of 15,118km from the US to attend the wedding. After eleven years of online friendship, we finally were able to meet each other for the first time in 2016.
Suffice to say that Emily is a lifelong friend of mine. And this will be important to remember when I tell my viva story.
I submitted my thesis on 15th August, 2024, as you may recall from my previous post. As soon as that thesis was submitted, life became wonderful again. To celebrate good friend of mine convinced me to play Elden Ring on Friday and Saturday nights—time I usually would spend working on my thesis. As a former gamer who had quit games in 2013, it felt great to hold a controller again. I also started getting into acrylic painting on canvas. And I started writing again.
Was I worried about the upcoming viva? Yes, and no.
A PhD is essentially a three- to five-year long exam, even though calling it an “exam” is pretty misleading. In a PhD, you are presented with one main question (your research question), which you had determined yourself. You then have to explain how you sought to answer the question, which is your methodology. Then you describe what you found, which are your results. And then you need to justify how the results answer the question. This is your entire thesis. A viva is just that, but in front of people who can challenge and question you.
So, in a way, I wasn’t worried because I had worked on that thesis. I made sure that everything was explained, was justified. I wrote and rewrote so many sections so many times, and I cited so many researchers because I was worried that any one source could be disputed. I used ChatGPT to understand why my fuzzy Delphi formulas were the way they were, why the threshold numbers were what they were, how the results were strong and weak and what this meant. I studied the HECK out of my thesis, and knew it inside out and backwards.
But I was also nervous because like I said, the viva is the oral exam. The panel could question or challenge me or point out a blind spot that I had never noticed. So I was definitely nervous about that. Still, after printing out the hardcopy draft of my thesis in August, I set it aside to paint and play games and write stories, and I didn’t pick it up again until December.
On 13th December 2024, I was informed that my PhD viva would be on the 23rd, ten days away, and that I would get the black and white notice soon. The news wasn’t exactly surprising. Per my university’s standard practice, a viva is normally scheduled around three to four months after submitting the thesis, so the timeline was correct and I was already expecting it. As soon as I was informed of the date of the viva, however, I began to get those butterflies. I took out my printed thesis and began highlighting important sections. I started to prepare my slides. I scheduled a mock viva session with my supervisors.
Then, the next day, on 14th December, 2024, I got a call from Emily.
Now, online phone calls are very rare between us. With the 12-hour time zone difference between Malaysia and the USA, our conversations are often over chats and very sporadic. Emily had married Chris they have a child together, I also have kids of my own, and between work and family and other things going on, we actually hadn’t really spoken to each other much throughout that year.
So when I got the call at 1PM Malaysia time, I knew it was unusual, as it would have been around midnight for her. I knew that whatever the call was about…it was serious.
And it was.
“Chris had a aneurysm,” Emily said to me when I got on the call, and started to cry.
She told me that the aneurysm was in an inoperable part of his brain, and that there was nothing that the doctors could do. She told me that she was at the hospital, and that her son was at home with a friend.
“Oh, my God,” I answered, because…what could you say to that kind of news? I don’t even really remember what we said during that phone call. Emily told me what happened, and what was going on, but it seems hazy and I can’t bring myself to rehash the conversation here—not that I want to, anyway. But as soon as we ended the call, I called another friend of mine and said I’m just going to book my flight tickets and head there, right after my viva.
Hold your horses, my friend said, because she knows intimately well how I tend to rush headlong into things without thinking. It’s Christmas season, she said, which means tickets would either be sold out, or be astronomically expensive. I’d need a visa, she reminded. Then I realized that I didn’t even have a passport as it had expired a while back.
We’ll figure it out, she said. Get the right date, the right plans in place. Find out what needs to be done. It just couldn’t be done right there and then.
For the next few days, Chris was kept on the ventilator, since he’s an organ donor and they needed to find placements. I was in a dream state, as I prepared for my viva and received updates from Emily on what’s going on.
He passed on 17th December, 2024. A day after my own wedding anniversary. Hubs and I didn’t go and celebrate, of course. There was nothing to celebrate. Not this year.
Sometimes I wonder if my wedding anniversary would ever be the same again. How could I celebrate, when the date I married my husband is the same date my lifelong friend lost hers?
On 19th December, I had a mock viva session with my supervisors. I was pretty numb. I didn’t really want to be there. I wanted to be with Emily, to be with her during the saddest week of her life. She had been there when my life was dark and lonely, and I couldn’t extend the same courtesy to her.
I received some good feedback to improve my slides. A lot of the slides were wordy, my supervisors said, so I was asked to make them shorter, easier to read.
The next day, Emily messaged me. She said that Chris’s funeral would be on the 23rd December.
The same date as my viva date.
The weekend arrived. I scheduled a late-night painting session with my friend, which we sometimes do where we’d go online and work on our separate paint projects while chatting away. I needed to get my mind off the emotional toll and anticipation. She asked me how I was with the viva preparation. I said apart from a couple of slides that needed tweaking, I was pretty ready.
I wasn’t in any mood to study for it anyway.
23rd December, 2024.
My viva was scheduled to be held at 9AM. It was Christmas break, which meant that the campus was especially empty. A lot of lecturers were on leave, and students were not around. Hubs took the day off. We had breakfast that morning, with the kids, and he sent me to my faculty early in the morning.
The viva, overall, went very well.
I presented my slides for around half an hour, and the question and answer session was around 2 hours. There were no issues with my methodology, or my results. If anything, I received feedback for my writing style, which is very “narrative” (something you want to avoid in academic writing), but that’s a given considering my background in fiction and narrative writing, I suppose. Old habits die hard.
The one area where I was really, REALLY shot down during the viva was for the fifth chapter of my thesis, in the section, “Contributions of the Study”. In this section, I am supposed to write about how my study has contributed—to theory, methodology, policy, pedagogy, society, etc. And I wrote probably just one paragraph for each subheading. My viva panel admonished me for that. The contributions section, they said, is the most important part of the thesis, as it’s where I justify what I have contributed after five years of work. It’s a section that requires some contemplation, so I was asked to spend more time fixing that.
I passed my viva with minor corrections, which were to be submitted within the next three months.
When the viva ended, one of my supervisors cried, but I didn’t. My heart ached too much for me to feel the joy in passing my viva. One of my close colleagues bought flowers for me, and we took a picture together in front of the faculty—but in my mind, as I held the flowers, my thought went to Emily, and how she would also be receiving flowers, but for her husband’s funeral.
In fact, I barely have any pictures of my viva, which is something I mourn but don’t regret.
Perhaps some of you may be wondering, why I decided to write my viva story this way. I mean, what I’m writing is essentially a memoir of my PhD journey. I could remove the whole part about Chris’s passing, because this is something related to “personal” life, and not the PhD journey. I could just talk about the viva, what questions I was asked, how I responded, and so on. I decided not to do that, because that felt like such a small, insignificant part of my viva.
The reality is that during this PhD, some of the challenges I faced were personal—like fracturing my spine, moving houses, and pregnancy. Ultimately, the reason I decided to write my viva story this way is because I believe that in any PhD journey, it’s impossible to separate the personal from the PhD.
A PhD is an incredibly personal journey. It’s not something we do professionally. We don’t get paid to do the PhD. We’d be rewarded for sure, but not paid to do it. And doing a PhD also involves a lot of personal sacrifice. It requires us to sacrifice our time with family, our time with our hobbies, money, tranquility.
I wasn’t able to go to the US to be with Emily, because I had my viva, and then the very short period after to work on and submit my corrected thesis. There has just been so much sacrifice, so much give and take.
I find it impossible to segment between PhD and Life. For five years, the PhD was a big part of my life, and I am glad to be done with it. It’s not something I look back on fondly. I am proud of myself, for sure. I have learned a lot from it, and through it. But it has been a very, very hard five years. Rewarding, yes. But hard.
This 10-ish episode of my PhD journey does not come close to capturing everything that went on during those five years of life. There were some challenges I had to deal with that were so incredibly personal that it couldn’t make it into these pages and words that I type. That’s the thing about memoirs though. We get to choose what gets included and what doesn’t. And in my view, Chris’s passing cannot be unlinked from my viva—there is no way for me to remember my viva without remembering his passing and the pain that I know my lifelong friend has gone through and is still going through.
I wish I could be one of those writers who inspire through joy. Who can write about how happy I felt when the viva was done, how I cried tears of joy, and all that—but I can’t, because that’s not how it went for me. I didn’t cry tears of joy because I was too sad thinking about Emily. We barely even celebrated that afternoon.
So, what I can write about, is how no matter how dark the world gets, if you’re doing your PhD right now, you need to find something to keep you going. 2024 was a very, very dark year for me, for reasons I haven’t been able to write fully in this memoir, and I often thought, “How much worse can this get?” but still, I saw it through. I looked at my kids and I knew that I didn’t want to stretch this PhD any further. I needed to get it done. And so I did.
There needs to be a compelling enough reason for you to keep going. Three years is a long time. Five years is a long time. So during the darkest of times, when all you feel like is giving up, there needs to be a reason for you to keep going. To get another respondent. Or to do another test. Or find another reference. Or write another sentence.
Sometimes, all rational thinking and or emotional feelings just need to be swept aside, and you’d just need to put your head down and do it. Because a PhD is self-driven. It’s an exam you chose to take, to answer a research question you set, using a methodology you chose, through results that you obtained. And when—not if, but when—when you are successful, the palpable relief you’ll feel is like no other. Like Frodo and how he felt when the eagles came to rescue him—it’s done. If anything, chase that feeling of doneness, because that’s also good enough to keep you going.