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Week 1: Command of the material
Establish how well you know your chosen topic: the mechanism behind it, its application to something you have not prepared for, and where it stops being true.
Careers · Self-serve
Three rooms, run weekly, measured over time.
A self-serve program for anyone defending their own thesis, dissertation or written work under oral examination, built on Renatus. Three simulation rooms · Three weeks, one room a week · Unlimited attempts · Ongoing thereafter.
3 weeks · 3 rooms · Total time 35 min
Sign up to continueDoctoral candidates before a viva, master's and final-year students before a dissertation or project defence, and anyone facing an oral examination on their own written work.
A self-serve program for anyone defending their own thesis, dissertation or written work under oral examination, built on Renatus. Three simulation rooms · Three weeks, one room a week · Unlimited attempts · Ongoing thereafter.
Calibration: the confirmed topic and scope, the selected listener archetype and the selected challenge level.
Calibration: role title, audience, industry or sector, and a line of working context.
Calibration: your role as the candidate defending the position, the side or position you are rehearsing, the forum type (choose "other hearing setting" for a defence or viva panel), the challenge level (measured, firm or highly challenging, to match how hard your panel is expected to push), your field, and a line on the thesis.
You have one chance to defend years of work to people whose only job that day is to find its weak points. A viva or oral defence asks you to explain your reasoning, apply it to a case you have not prepared for, say where a claim stops being true, and say "I don't know" cleanly rather than guess your way past it. This program prepares you through simulation. Ren builds each room from your own topic, your own argument and your own thesis, and plays the examiner, the audience or the panel in it, so every run moves with what you say.
Establish how well you know your chosen topic: the mechanism behind it, its application to something you have not prepared for, and where it stops being true.
Deliver your lead argument to a demanding audience, use your evidence when they push back, and answer the question you were asked.
Answer directly and accurately from your own thesis: what it says, what it does not say, and what you know first-hand against what you read, were told, or worked out.