How to Prepare for a Successful Dissertation Defense (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: You have collected your data, you have analyzed your data, and you have your findings. You have written your final chapter of your dissertation. Now is the time for you to prepare for your defense. You are thinking, what should I do in order to prepare? I'm going to give you five things that you have to think about as you are preparing for your defense. Number one is you have to read and re-read your document. It's so important for you to do that. Why do you have to do that? Let me tell you something very important. Technically, you produced the document, so you wrote chapter one to five of your dissertation, and you have already given the document to your committee for them to read and provide you feedback so they are aware of the document. During your defense, they might ask you questions about what you have written. You have to make sure that you know everything that is in the document so that you'll be able to answer their questions. One example is, what is the significance of your study? In terms of your methodology, why did you choose that methodology? How did you collect your data? Why did you focus on this group of people? Why? All these will be based on the documents that you have given to them, so it's very important for you to really immerse yourself with your document, which is your dissertation, so that when you go and they ask you questions, you'll be able to respond because you know everything that is in the document. I'm not saying that you have to memorize everything in the document. No, you just have to be aware of what you have written. Let's say they mention chapter one. You know what you wrote about chapter one, right? And when they mention your chapter two in terms of literature review, you know the main literature that you reviewed. When they ask you questions about your theoretical framework, you know your theoretical framework and how it informs your study. So that's the number one. Read and reread your dissertation document. Number two. Number two is paying attention to the feedback that they have provided to you. Normally, you give all the documents to your committee. They have time to review, and sometimes they have to provide you some feedback. So make sure that you review the feedback and incorporate all the feedback. Paying attention to feedback is very important. If you have a committee member always providing you feedback about methodology, you have to expect that during the defense, they might ask you about your research method, right? If they ask a lot about your theoretical framework, if they ask a lot about how you apply your study, what is the implication of your study, they provide you feedback about how to present the findings. All these are signals that will give you an idea about the kinds of questions that you're going to receive from them. So it helps you to anticipate the areas that they are going to ask you questions, and then you prepare yourself. Sometimes, some of the committee members may provide you feedback that you did not really incorporate the feedback. It's very important that you let them know why you did not incorporate the feedback. Maybe it's not consistent with your methodology. Maybe they misunderstood what you wanted to find out. So it's very important to let them know before the defense, have that communication, so that during the defense, they might not bring that issue anymore, because you have already addressed. And even if they bring that, you're already prepared about how you want to respond, right? Next one is to draft the content of your presentation. This is a good time for you to think about what kind of information do I want to present? Are you going to talk about the problem of your study? What kind of problem that you identify in your study? What kind of gap that you identify? Are you going to talk about the purpose of the study? Are you going to talk about your research question, the conceptual framework, the literature review? Are you going to talk about the research design, the population and sample, data collection process, data analysis, participant demographics and findings and discussion? These are the areas that you should think about as you are working on drafting the content of your presentation. One thing that you have to think about is that the information in your dissertation document is a lot. There's no way that you can present all the information within the time that you have been given, right? So you have to strategize. You have to think about what are the main issues or what are my main areas that I want to present? Your committee members already know the content of your dissertation. Your role here is to present the important aspects of your dissertation within the time that you have been given. So in the normal presentation, I think that if I'm listening to your dissertation, I want you to talk about the problem. What specific problem that caused you to do this study? Or what problem that you want to address in your study? I also want to also know the purpose of your study. You can also mention the research question if you want to talk about that, but the purpose and the research question are quite related. So because of time, you may maybe limit yourself to the purpose, but also stating the research question is fine, right? And sometimes you can also talk about the significance of the study. Why is it necessary for you to do this research? I think that's the thing that you have to also think about. You can also discuss the theoretical framework, right? What model or collection of concepts or a theory informs your study? And how is it informing your study? So you can talk about all of them. But the thing that you really have to emphasize is that, remember, you are doing a defense. You are defending your study. So this means that you have to emphasize more on the reason behind the decisions and action that you took in the study, right? What people are going to be interested in is why did you focus on this problem? Why this purpose? Why this research question? Why this theoretical framework? Why did you focus on these main researchers in terms of literature review, right? Or this main topic? Why did you focus on a specific methodology? Why did you focus on IP? Why did you focus on descriptive qualitative study? Why did you focus on ethnography, right? Why this participant? In your presentation, you have to focus less on describing what you did and more on why you did what you did, right? And I think that's what people want to know because your committee members already know the content. They have read your document. So what is really going to be very interesting is why? What is the thinking behind things that you did? And I think if you emphasize on that, that would be great. And also, when you are preparing for the content, you are not only focused on areas that you want to talk about. It's also focused on the sequence of your presentation, right? What is the sequence of your topics or the areas that you want to present, right? The easier way is to go according to how you arrange your topics in your dissertation document, right? The simplest way is going through the problem. You talk about a problem. You talk about the purpose of the study, the research question, significance of the study, theoretical framework, literature review, research design, population sample recruitment, and data collection process, data analysis, participant demographics, the findings, and also discussion, right? This is the sequence that you can follow. That's the simplest one. But you just have to make sure that there's a flow in the presentation, right? When one information or one topic leads to another topic. But it can also make your presentation very interesting. How do you make your presentation interesting? What about starting from maybe the significance of the study, right? And then after talking about why this study is so important, then you start with the problem and talk about a purpose. Or even you can start by saying that these are the findings of my study. This is a brief information about my finding. Let me tell you how I was able to arrive at my findings. Let me start with a problem. So you see how you can make your presentation more engaging if you start with something that you're not expecting and then connect it to the problem, purpose, research question, right? So the most important thing is that you are telling the story about how you did your research. You can frame in such a way that it's going to be engaging at the same time presenting all the things or the main information that people want to know, right? So you don't have to necessarily start from the problem, purpose, and go down. Start with something that's going to attract people's attention to your presentation, right? So the next one that you have to think about is designing your PowerPoint. So designing your PowerPoint, there are some principles that you have to follow so that your presentation will be engaging, right? What are some of the principles? One of the principles or the rules is that the number of words for each of the slides shouldn't be more than 75 words, right? And the font size shouldn't be less than 24. And also you have to carefully choose the colors that you want to use for your presentation, right? And choosing about not more than three colors, it will be very good. It shows consistency and then the colors will not distract the flow of the information, right? So deciding on the colors will be very important for you, right? And if you want to know and learn more about these principles and the best practice concerning presentation, I developed a very short course for that. I'll put the link in the description section there so that you can, if you can explore and learn more so that you'll be able to know what is expected of you when you are doing your presentation or put all the information in PowerPoint, right? Whenever your slides, the words in your slides is more than 75 words, it becomes a document. What happens is that people will stop paying attention to what you're saying and reading the slide. And you don't want your audience to read a slide, you want your audience to listen to your presentation, right? So having few information there in most of the time in bulletin will be very good and it will also enhance the engagement. And you may ask, now that we have AI, should I use AI to do my PowerPoint? Yes, you could use AI, but you just have to be very careful because let's say you want to use maybe one of the AI tools like Gamma, right? You have to provide Gamma with all the content that you want Gamma to include in a PowerPoint, right? You can also use Chatsheep or Cloud, but provide what you want to be included in each of the slides. If you don't do that, a system will generate the content for you and it may not be in line about how you want to tell the story. The way you want to sequence your content may be very different from what the AI has generated for you. And if you do that, people may not pay attention to you because the presentation is not flowing naturally because you are following the sequence suggested to you by AI. So as I said, you can use AI, but provide the system the content so that it will be in line with how you want to present that information, right? And I also have a presentation on how to use AI like Chatsheep or Cloud to generate very engaging PowerPoint. I'll put it in the link there so that you'll be able to get access to it and review. And also, if you have any questions concerning presentations, you can put in the comment section and I'll be happy to address them for you. And also, I provide a one-on-one consultation. If you are preparing for your defense and you want me to coach you and prepare you for your defense, you can always contact me and you'll meet one-on-one and I'll be able to coach you on how to successfully prepare for your defense. The last one is practice your presentation. When I say process, you're verbally presenting your content and sometime maybe recording your content and playing back so that you can see what you did and evaluate. You can also present it to your colleagues or your family members so that they can provide you some feedback. Imagine that you don't practice and then you are doing a presentation and then you are going beyond and you are rushing people through the process and you are apologizing for going beyond the time. You don't want to be viewed as a person who didn't prepare for the presentation. So, the more you prepare, the more confident you become and the less anxious you become and the more successful you become because you have rehearsed the content, anticipated a kind of question they're going to ask you, and then you have practiced how you're going to respond to their questions. So, these are the five things that you have to think about when you are preparing for your dissertation defense. I hope this one was helpful to you and don't forget to subscribe to my channel. Thank you so much for your time.