What’s in it for me?

Posted by Jean Adams

For quite a while I mulled on the idea of getting involved with the committee of a learned society. Initially I didn’t because I thought no-one would ever vote for a no-one like me. Then I worked out that they’re all pretty desperate for anyone and elections were more about process than manifestos or popularity contests. By which time I had decided it sounded like a lot of work, with nothing much in it for me.

I quite often find myself thinking, “nah...that sounds like a lot of work, with nothing much in it for me”. My interpretation of this is that I am a pretty lazy person with a strong selfish streak. But when I’ve talked about it to other people they say it is ‘being strategic’. From which I have concluded that other people justify their personal shortcomings to themselves by dressing them up in management speak.

It is all about me

But you know how these things happen. You have your annual appraisal and your appraiser says: “why don’t you get involved with a learned society?” And you can’t say straight out that you’re not going to do that because it’s sounds like a lot of work, with not much pay back and that really you’re a pretty lazy person with a strong selfish streak. So you put it down on your list of objectives for the next year. Then you get a e-newsletter from a society seeking nominations for committee members, and your appraiser forwards it to you as well so you can’t ignore it, and before you know it you find yourself as secretary of the UK Society for Something No-one’s Ever Heard Of.

I am General Secretary of the UK Society of Behavioural Medicine. If you’ve not heard of it, you should look us up. It’s a great society. The annual meetings are well organised (I have been to all but one of them), they attract high quality keynote speakers, the parallels are interesting, and the longer symposia and structured discussion sessions are well thought out and stimulating. But the very best thing about UKSBM is that Behavioural Medicine is such a wide topic area that a huge range of interesting people come to the meetings.

I have been General Secretary of UKSBM for eighteen months now. Although my tenure was preceded by a six month period of shadowing the out-going secretary, I think I spent at least the first 12 months of the job feeling like I was just on the right side of totally out of control. My first task was to organise an election for a new Membership Secretary. Which I pretty much made up as I went along. And then there was the minutes – of four committee meetings a year plus an AGM. I guarantee there is no-one in the world who hates writing minutes more than me.

To be honest, it’s not a lot of work. It is, by its nature, something that you have to be pretty well organised to do okay at. Which can sometimes be a challenge. It is possible that I have agreed to organise the 2015 annual scientific meeting, which I expect will be a lot of work. But right now I am doing my best not to think about that. I don’t get free conference registration. I do get one free lunch at a committee meeting and one free pre-conference dinner per year – which is nice. I have met a lot of people I would never have met before.

What I’d never anticipated was something that happened right in the middle of the last committee meeting I went to. There I was, trying my best to document the decisions that were being made, when I suddenly realised that I was enjoying myself. Not enjoying myself writing minutes. That’s never going to happen. But just enjoying myself having interesting discussions on how to make UKSBM better with a bunch of clever, interesting people. Which, I promise you, is more than enough ‘what’s in it for me’ to keep me doing it for at least another 18 months.

They f*ck you up these parenting 'experts'

Posted by Bronia Arnott

Oliver James, author of They f*** you up: How to survive family life, spoke at the Hay Festival recently criticising modern parenting as too 'parent-led'. He said that infant’s needs should be responded to immediately and children should be given a sense of control for optimal development.

As someone who has studied parenting styles in infancy, the effects of infant-led parenting on breast feeding continuation, and the role of parental representations on attachment security in infancy you might think I would be nodding my head in agreement with him.

You would be wrong.

Instead I was doing this:

Thanks to @RachelStocker for bringing this gif to my attention

Why?

Firstly, because I think James is misguided in what being a ‘child-led’ parent is all about. He talks about responding “immediately” to infants, but responding quickly does not equate to responding sensitively. You can imagine a scenario where a parent responds quickly to a crying baby by shouting at it; the response is immediate but few would consider it to be very 'child-led'. Moving on to consider older children, James thinks that we should ‘love-bomb’ them. This ridiculous-sounding term apparently involves taking children away for a one-on-one weekend of activities directed by the child. That’s great, I’m all for fostering children’s sense of agency, but what happens when your child requests that you go to Disney World when you have been saving for weeks just to buy them some new school shoes?

The second problem that I have with what James had to say is his blatant disregard for scientific evidence. There is evidence out there which concludes that infant-led parenting and that treating your child as an individual with a mind of their own have positive effects. However, there is no evidence for what James specifically proposes. Unlike other scientists and researchers who actually need evidence to support our ideas, if you are Oliver James apparently you just announce it to the media and claim that you are far too busy and “don’t have time to muck about doing intervention studies”. 

You know Oliver, I feel your pain – I’m a busy working mum. It might seem like a lot of a hassle having to go through ethical approval, research governance, piloting, and assessing whether your intervention is effective. However, that is the way that research works. If I have a hypothesis then I am expected to test it, and then to publish my findings for scrutiny by others. I need to have evidence of efficacy, feasibility, and acceptability of any interventions I propose, not just anecdotes from parents who have emailed me to tell me that they think that I am right.

This brings me to the final point. James talks about 'parenting' but when you dig a bit deeper what he is really talking about is mothers. It is mothers who "should respond immediately" and what children really need is "a weekend with their mothers". Do fathers not have some role to play in this? Is parenting solely the domain of women? Does James not have anything to say about men? Actually he does have a lot to say about men. He says that men are “unpleasant, psychopathic, narcissistic, and Machiavellian”. He argues that we live in a society in which women are to blame for wanting to be like men and to beat mean at their own game. A game which clearly doesn’t involve love-bombing their children…

I disagree with what James had to say as a parent, as a scientist and as a woman.

But, I’m not writing this because I disagree with what he has to say. I can choose not to read any other articles by him. Instead I feel compelled to write this because there are many other parents out there who will read his comments. I’m not overly concerned that they might go out and ‘love-bomb’ their kids; maybe James is right and it “wouldn’t do any harm”. What I am concerned about is that parents are constantly overloaded with conflicting ‘advice’ from so called parenting ‘experts’. James is not alone in providing unsubstantiated ‘expert advice’ on parenting - yes, I’m looking at you Susan Greenfield and also at you Gina Ford. 

Mothers and fathers trying to do their best for their children are constantly bombarded with all sorts of unsupported conjecture dressed up as science through the media. If parents are looking for information then why can they not be given evidence-based research rather than being exposed to the uncorroborated opinions of self-styled parenting gurus? Parenting is hard enough without trying to fight your way through pseudo-science pedalled by these so called ‘experts’.

This kind of parenting expert could really f*ck you off, if not f*ck you up.


All quotes in this post are taken directly from this article.

Who ya gonna call?

Posted by Mark Welford

I think it’s fair to say that those of us in public health all want to improve health and wellbeing and help reduce the gap between the least and most healthy in our society.

And that’s why Fuse exists - to tackle the major health problems people face, that prevent them leading longer and more fulfilling lives.

This mission is a two-way collaboration with our partners in public health and social care. But, we face a dilemma:

1) How useful is most research?
2) How many decisions in public health commissioning or service development are properly evidence based?

Or to massively simplify (I’m no academic):

1) Supply - there are researchers in universities waving around their academic papers shouting: “I wish my research would change the world!”
2) Demand - there are our partners in public health (often called policy and practice partners, although I’m not sure this really captures them) seated at their desks thinking: “I wish I had some evidence to inform my decision”.

At which point - spotting a potentially dangerous chasm - we have traditionally all looked to the skies for help. To the shout of: Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Evidence-man (unmistakable ‘E’ on red underwear over blue tights), an academic might have flown in with even shinier evidence briefs (double entendre intended!) or an implementation ‘tool’ to rescue the situation.

Unfortunately our evidence superhero often hits the wall with a resounding ‘Thwaak!’ as his worked up implementation solution still fails to grab his practice partners and become part of their reality.

All too often research results take too long to get into practice or they aren’t as relevant or useful as they should be. Maybe we need to look at public health problems from a practitioner perspective and work collaboratively to define the sorts of research questions we should be asking and attempting to answer? Perhaps then the answers would be both relevant and pertinent to local circumstances.

And that’s why today we’ve launched askfuse, our new research and evaluation service with a single point of contact. Designed to respond to requests made by our partners working in public health and social care, we hope that it will help to find research solutions to address pressing local issues.

The aim is to provide a service that acts as a portal to broker access to expertise in the five North East Universities, provides useful, timely outputs, that are independent, high quality and in plain English, builds long term working collaboration to improve flow of evidence into practice, and works for the benefit of the health of local people.

Working with those people at the coal face, we’ll be able to evaluate services, review documents, analyse and interpret data, or collaborate on larger projects that establish new evidence.

Over a number of months Janet Shucksmith, Rosemary Rushmer, Avril Rhodes, Rebekah McNaughton and I have been putting all the systems in place to ensure that the service (fingers crossed) runs smoothly but I won’t bore you with all that detail, just visit the askfuse webpages to find out more.

The Batphone is manned and - all being well - we will soon be travelling around the region in the BatCorsa.

We’ve even created an animation to help communicate the message about askfuse in an innovative and exciting way, which you can see premiered at the launch of askfuse during Fuse’s fifth birthday celebration today at Beamish Hall. Hope to see you there.

So to finish this post with a catchphrase spawned from another US multi-media movie franchise.

Who ya gonna call?


To find out how askfuse could help you, call 01642 342757, email ask@fuse.ac.uk, or visit the website. 

Data collection

Posted by Heather Yoeli

What follows is the hypothetical transcript of a conversation I’ve had a few times recently:

COLLEAGUE Heather, hello! Where have you been for the last few months and why didn’t you reply to that email I sent round about the night out?

ME Hi! Sorry I’ve not been around. I’ve been busy with fieldwork with participants, and have been interviewing people for my PhD.

COLLEAGUE Great! So you’ve finally started data collection, then…

ME (awkward pause) Well, I’ve been interviewing people…

COLLEAGUE But that is data collection, surely. Have you begun data analysis yet?

ME (awkward pause) Ummm… but how’s your study going? Have you heard back from the Ethics Committee yet? And how’s your partner getting on with the new job?

Research participants or human beings?

Ever since I began this project, I’ve had a niggling and non-specific aversion to the term ‘data collection’ being used to describe my research activities. Sometimes, though, words reveal more than we realise.

The OED defines data as:

Facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis; the quantities, characters, or symbols on which operations are performed by a computer … things known or assumed as facts, making the basis of reasoning or calculation

Similarly, the FreeDictionary defines data as:

1. Factual information, especially information organized for analysis or used to reason or make decisions.

2. Numerical or other information represented in a form suitable for processing by computer.

3. Values derived from scientific experiments.

And the BBC’s GCSE Bitesize website provides an excellent explanation of the relationship between data and information and knowledge.

From these three sources, we could surmise the following:

• Data is fact

• Data is that which we collect for our research

• Data is collected for analysis and for use 

• Most of our thinking about data is informed by the quantifiable, and by our use of computers

Certainly, then, the concept of data collection as integral to the PhD process presents a challenge for PhD studies like mine, which seek to be as qualitative, as theoretical, as participatory, and as participant-led as possible. The term data collection presses the question of what we might be taking from participants, of what we might be doing with what they have given us, of what ownership of and control over what they have given us our participants might retain, and of therefore what responsibilities we might have towards them. As fellow human beings, my participants are more than simply pseudonymous nodes with attitude codes on an NVivo database.

What common terms in research, or in public health, make you uncomfortable?

The Pig Observation

Posted by Peter Tennant

You don't make a pig any fatter by weighting it. For years this has been my favourite animal-related moral, narrowly beating The Fox and the Grapes*. The pig observation is a classic remark on the value, or lack thereof, of examination as an educational device. You don't make a child any cleverer by testing it. Yet for every summer of my childhood (and much of my early adulthood), I was ritually weighed. Since I had a good memory, I rather enjoyed it. But much I believed that recounting the four chambers of a cow's stomach proved I was smart, it didn't; it just proved I could remember the four chambers of a cow's stomach.

This October, UK higher education takes part in its own pig weighting festival, the Research Excellence Framework (or REF). The premise is reasonable. The UK government has £1.76 billion that it wants to spend on research. Rather than dole it out equally, it's decided it's fairer (and more cost effective) to try and give the money to the places that do the most and the best research.

So far so fair. But how do you go about such a task? They could have done a complete audit. Each university presents the sum of all its research (in the form of books, publications etc) and the money is then given to those that have done the most. Except quality obviously matters more than quantity, so only those 'outputs' over a certain minimum standard will be deemed worthy of reward, with standard judged in the usual academic way, i.e. by groups of dusty professors. Presumably they were offered biscuits; professors will do anything for biscuits. Of course, they can't be expected to read everything (have you ever tried to read an academic paper? YAWN!), so instead universities only have to provide a selection of outputs for each researcher, and they don't have to include every member of staff either.

Sounds reasonable enough? Except you now have the formula for a right old mess. Especially once you add that as well as deciding how the money gets spent, the REF will also be used to judge reputation.

Poppleton University: Home to the fattest pigs outside the banking industry

Most people agree that academic league tables are a pretty useless way of comparing schools. Yet schools still do everything they can to maximise their standing. My school focused relentlessly on the C boundary (the grade considered a good pass in the English aged 16 examinations). If you were safely above it, you were on your own. If you were too far below it? Well, around 50 kids were expelled at aged 15 for 'behavioural problems'. The fact they had no hope of getting 5 subjects at C or above was presumably a convenient coincidence.

Similar shenanigans were apparent during the last audit of UK academic research. Some departments amusingly entered only a handful of their best performing staff to boost their showing. This time, star researchers are being parachuted in like premier league football stars and some places are even employing specialist REF gurus to help boost their submissions.

But isn't this all just harmless pig trading? Well, there's another more insidious problem. You can't measure something without changing it. In fact, you can't even observe something without changing it. In a remarkable experiment that not only forms the foundation of quantum physics, but also (and more importantly) forms my favourite non-animal related moral, it can be shown that the universe itself will mischievously change its behaviour when it's being observed. Fire a beam of electrons at two narrow slits and they will make a pattern as if each electron has miraculously gone through both slits at the same time. Set up monitors on each slit to watch this happening and... the pattern changes... to the boring 'one electron per slit' one that you would classically expect. Somehow the electrons know when they're being watched and behave differently. Like me if I'm practising a silly voice and then realise someone can hear me.

In trying to measure 'quality', the REF changes the research environment in a number of ways, the biggest being a dangerous shift towards short-termism. To be REFable (the quite unsavoury term used to mean 'worthy of submission') a member of staff usually needs (among other things) four high quality publications within the audit timeframe. Firstly, this means that a lot of staff are going to be branded as 'unworthy' despite producing work that is 'recognised internationally'**. Which isn't very nice. Or very motivating. If a group of dusty professors told me that my research wasn't any good, I'd instantly conclude they're all past it. So yes, I'd be just like the fox in the Fox and the Grapes. Only with a slightly less bushy tail. Secondly, focussing on 'four high quality publications' doesn't leave much time for any real scientific exploration, i.e. the kind that takes a lot of time and repeated effort to perfect. Like Darwin's On the Origin of Species. 20 years to write a single book? There's no way Darwin would have been REFable.

This shortermism is further exaggerated by the REF's attempt to measure 'impact'. The argument goes like this: since the public pay for academic research they deserve to see tangible benefits. Thanks to 'evidence based medicine' this isn't too hard for someone working in public health, just come up with some good evidence and eventually it'll filter through the system***. But for other subjects… Computing? Electricity? E=MC^2? List the world's greatest intellectual advances and most of them have one thing in common: it took years for any of them to have a measurable 'impact' on society. Then they changed the world.

So next time you set about trying to measure something, think carefully about the possible side effects. In other words, beware Goodhart's Law: 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure'. Targets are blamed for many evils within the NHS. The REF seems pretty tame in comparison. It may cost millions, stress out thousands, and undermine the very heart of scientific endeavour, but there was no alternative, especially not one that was considerably cheaper and easier... Actually, scratch that last point... I don't know about you, but I fancy a bacon sandwich…



*The Fox and the Grapes is my favourite of Aesop's fables, and a classic illustration of cognitive dissonance. A hungry fox spies some grapes hanging from a tree. Several times he tries to reach them, but he can never quite jump high enough. Eventually, he gives up and concludes the grapes were probably sour anyway, thereby reducing the dissonance between his desire to eat them and his inability to obtain them.

**The REF will grade research into four categories. Unless the work is considered at least 'internationally excellent' (i.e. 3 star) it won't be considered worthy of funding.

***Well, that's the idea. Unfortunately, politicians don't always like 'evidence'. Especially when the evidence works against their financial interests.

Seaweed for sustainable prosperity: why is it a public health issue and why would I go to a seaweed symposium?

Posted by Duika Burges Watson

I recently returned from Indonesia and the 21st International Seaweed Symposium. It’s been a bit of a fascination since my honours thesis in Indonesia documenting the international seaweed trade and the relationship between the hundred of thousands of farmers and the main consumers of the resource – us in the west. In my PhD I focused on one extract from seaweed, carrageenan, and considered how perceptions of risk in the public health sphere have influenced where and when it is used.

When I say ‘seaweed’ to a UK audience the common response is that people have tried ‘crispy seaweed’ in Chinese restaurants - and like it. The use of seaweed in the western diet and health applications is far more extensive than most people realise, and the potential of seaweeds to mitigate impacts of climate change, to address worsening food security issues and to provide some astonishing preventive health technologies (including as a barrier to viruses like HIV and HPV and for immune function) is not what most people would think about. The ‘story’ of seaweed is a rapidly developing one, and at the International Seaweed Symposium I was exposed to the many ways that we need to start thinking differently not just about this expanding and plentiful resource, but it also how we are going to address food security, climate change and health prevention issues in the future. 

Indonesian women make new food products from seaweed to sell at local markets

Climate change is having a major impact on agriculture. What we can grow is changing, the needs for more food increasing, and yet we have limited fresh water and land. Most of the world is covered by salt water. The United Nations is promoting ‘climate smart agriculture’- but how will this conversion happen with such limited space? Seaweed doesn’t need fresh water to grow and in 2010, the 20 million tonnes of seaweed that was grown around the world was from aquaculture. The Indonesian government alone estimates 1,110,900 hectares are undeveloped and suitable for aquaculture of seaweed – and they are promoting its development like crazy.

We don’t currently eat much seaweed ‘direct’, but we are the major consumers of extracts from seaweed; and seaweeds are used in foods for animals, fish and plants. At the conference there were many discussions about using seaweed in animal and fish feeds – the latter has taken awhile to develop. The UN's Food & Agriculture Organization is now talking about non-carnivorous fish as more environmentally friendly (vegi-fish!). Supplementing fish feeds with seaweed (currently mostly fed on fish with less than perfect ‘conversion ratios’) and aquaculture of seaweed eating fish were topics at the conference.

Indonesian farmers were in force at the ISS; the bulk of the Indonesian seaweed gets used for additives and winds up in processed food and health products in the west. There were presentations on new food uses, both as novel food products made from the ‘raw’ material and for functional extracts for nutraceuticals. Seaweeds contain things that land plants do not. Some of these values are erroneously called ‘micro-nutrients’ but there is nothing micro about their impact on health. I was struck by the presentation for example, by a senior lecturer from the Menzies Institute for Health in Australia on the immune modulation values of ‘fucoidans’ from brown seaweeds. I came home wanting to eat more brown seaweeds.

On climate change I was given the honour of introducing Ik Kyo Chung’s plenary lecture on seaweeds as a carbon sink. From Pusan University in Korea, he is leading a new world movement that recognises that seaweeds ‘capture’ carbon at rates greater than any land based plant. And in Korea they are growing seaweeds on a large scale for such purposes – but as yet there is much to do to present the evidence to policy makers in order that seaweed aquaculture can be used for carbon credits.

But there was something else I needed to know. In 2007 I published an article in the leading science journal on seaweeds about the regulatory history of carrageenan. Carrageenan is ubiquitous in processed food products in the west, particularly dairy where as little as 0.1% is sufficient to suspend the cocoa in chocolate milk. The article had recently been cited in a Food and Drug Administration review of carrageenan in the States. This got taken up by a radical food advocacy group arguing that I had no right as a ‘geographer’ to be commenting on ‘science’ about the safety of carrageenan. So my name duly slurred (and along with that the field of health and medical geography) I wanted to know how the industry itself would react to the scare that the Cornucopia report was generating in the blogosphere about carrageenan safety.

My paper was a regulatory review, and the argument in the paper was about the public perception of risk. I concluded that no matter how much science you throw at it, once someone has generated a fear, it’s impossible to then put the ‘risk genie’ back in the bottle. Carrageenan is one of the most thoroughly studied polysaccharides on the planet, all regulatory agencies worldwide have declared it safe, and the number of independent reviews is staggering. The controversy over carrageenan was a result of some work done in the 1950s to develop a treatment for peptic ulcer. Scientists had a good idea that carrageenan was ‘soothing’ but to consume it in the amounts needed would gag you – it would be too viscous. So it was purposefully degraded. 

In human studies following 200 people over 2 years consuming large amounts of degraded carrageenan they found absolutely no problem at all. But a rat study showed some evidence that it might cause ulceration in the gut – and given the fear at the time related to the new discoveries around cancer – degraded carrageenan (and by association carrageenan used in foods), ulceration and cancer got irretrievably linked in the public perception of the substance. 

Since then there have been multiple reviews – and still no new evidence it is any risk to human health. Yet the more studies, the more the perception of risk appears in blogs, stories and tales written by people who do not know the history of the risk, or understand the difference between a purposefully degraded substance and an extract. In many ways this is not surprising, when ‘E’ numbers were introduced in the UK for example, rather than demonstrating to the public as the regulatory agencies hoped, that these substances were well studied and safe, people started to fear them. 

The latest fear campaign, written up as a report by the organic advocacy group Cornucopia, had been generated by studies discredited by regulatory agencies worldwide. The science on which the campaign was based even suggested consuming carrageenan-bearing seaweeds was a risk to health. Papers at the conference demonstrated multiple benefits to consuming carrageenan-bearing seaweeds. But the public perception of risk feeds on controversy, and feeds off the risk stories (particularly about food additives) far more than the scientific studies. Some ‘organic’ producers in the US have been removing carrageenan from their products as a result of the latest scare. It struck me was that if you are consuming large amounts of carrageenan, chances are you are consuming a heavily ‘processed’ food diet – in which case my public health training suggests to me there are other things to worry about than 0.1% of a seaweed extract in your chocolate milk.

The ISS is in my view a pretty unique organisation. The conference is attended by academics from multiple disciplines, industry representatives, government (the Indonesian minster of fisheries attended the whole thing) and the people who farm it. It is ‘translational’ as many of the people involved are there to find solutions that meet the needs of all stakeholders. I liked the model the conference provides for thinking about some of the issues we are going to confront, and in all the examples above, working in cross-disciplinary ways gives bigger picture answers that take more issues into account. The UK is surrounded by sea, with a wealth of seaweed resources and a great potential to do more in this field. But given that most people don’t even know that crispy seaweed is made of cabbage, there is a long way to go to convince policy makers to take this industry seriously.

The PhD Viva: a thing of nightmares? Some reflections from a recently viva-ed PhD student

Posted by Grant Gibson

Having recently been through the PhD viva process, I thought it might be interesting to share some of my experiences.

Ever since starting my PhD, the viva had been something to fear. Initially it’s little more than a vague, inchoate fear on the distant horizon, slowly growing as I analyse my data, begin writing up, and eventually submit my final draft. Then, a week after submission I get my viva date; suddenly it’s not so distant at all! At four weeks away the viva is all I can think about. A week to go and just thinking about the viva brings me out in a cold sweat. Friends and colleagues are supportive, telling me 'you'll be fine’. 

Add caption"Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham; www.phdcomics.com

But on my mind are the horror stories; the 6 hour viva in which the student is ripped apart page by painful page; the examiner with a score to settle against you, your supervisors and your department; or the poor soul who had to resubmit and worst of all be re-viva-ed. I dutifully prepare, asking myself 'what are the strengths and weaknesses of my work', but many of the fears remain. 

Finally, the day arrives and I’m sat outside the meeting room, trying to outwardly look calm but quivering like jelly inside. Then the internal examiner calls me and in I walk, ready to face my doom...

Maybe I'm being melodramatic, but I'm sure this story will be familiar to anyone who has undergone or is waiting for their viva. Undoubtedly a certain amount of anxiety is to be expected, after all the viva is an important event in the life of any postgraduate. But having been through the process I wonder, do these fears really reflect the reality of the viva? And more importantly, why do we do this to ourselves, collectively torturing ourselves like this? Has the viva taken on a mythic quality, making us like children, scared of the bogeyman hiding under the bed? Are the stories we all hear about the viva a rite of passage, a collective myth, or an extension of our very real anxieties about the PhD process? 

Perhaps you can only truly know what a viva is like by going through it, but in truth, far from an interrogation a good viva should be one of the few chances you'll ever get for you and your work to truly take central stage.

So did the horror stories come true? Of course not. My viva was very different to what I expected and much closer to what those who have gone through the process said it would be. Both of my examiners were enthusiastic about my work and genuinely wanted me to do well. Sure I was challenged; this is a PhD after all. But neither tried to trip me up or catch me out. And I found I had the confidence in my work to answer any tricky questions. 

My viva lasted an hour (not six!) and in the end I came through remarkably unscathed. Dare I say it, in a strange way I actually enjoyed it! I guess the moral of my story should be that no matter how much you might worry about your viva, it will almost certainly be nowhere near as bad as you think. So try not to let pre-viva anxiety get the better of you, you never know, you might even enjoy it!