This week I had my mock viva. I have lived to tell the tale. OK, so it wasn’t a complete disaster, but I am familiar with the format at the least, if I’m not brimming with confidence going into the real thing next week.

I think it would be wiser to share some of the secrets of a good viva after I have actually done the thing for real, otherwise I could be setting myself up for a fall. However, I have learnt that the most important thing is to not set myself up to be tripped up by blagging an answer I really don’t have much clue about. I think I know which bits I need to defend to the death and for the questions that aren’t exactly on my thesis I should give a short, non-committal answer that doesn’t leave me wide open for a follow-up.

I do know that it was a good tactic to do a mock and I would recommend it to every PhD student. Getting my supervisors to ask the questions and also make notes about my responses for a debriefing in the pub afterwards was a good move. I knew that my supervisors would know just the most difficult questions to ask to really test me, and they sure did. The fact that the mock was in the same room as the real thing will be next week, I think will be helpful too in making me feel used to the venue for the grilling of my life next week.

I shall report on how that goes…

So I have been re-reading my thesis lately, not that I need to memorise it before my viva next week, but I do need to familiarise myself with the words I typed in a caffeine-fuelled stupor before Christmas.

As I was reading, a few words jumped out off the page as being somewhat unexpected. But in the context of the thesis they make perfect sense, I didn’t put them in for a bet or anything, it’s just that four or five years ago I would never have guessed that of the 100,000 words these five would feature anywhere:

1. Haemodialysis. All foreign policy theses need to deal with the removal of waste products, such as urea, from the bloodstream. I’m not taking the piss.

2. Qatar. I admit that had I wrote ‘catarrh’ that would have been more disturbing but of all the countries mentioned in my thesis this one is the most unexpected, although Mauritius, Croatia and Romania get a mention and 5 years ago I wouldn’t have been able to see a connection between those and Portuguese foreign policy priorities either.

3. Tungsten. I really should have done a follow-up to that guy a few years ago who wrote his PhD on the history of darts. That would have been so cool. Imagine going to the pub to do your interviews!

4. Bourdieu. Only a passing reference to the French anthropologist. Other great French thinkers, I’m sure, will be jealous of Pierre for getting a mention when they didn’t.

5. Fisheries. I know the Portuguese love their fish, but there’s nothing duller than fisheries policy, but somehow it crept in.

I did achieve the rare feat of writing a Politics/International Relations PhD without referencing, or even reading: Foucault; Marx; Gramsci; Hobbes; Kant; or Katie Price. Kudos?