How to Summarise Your PhD Thesis in Three Minutes

Today’s post is a guest post of Chay Allen. Chay holds a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford (Christ Church, 2015) and has spent fifteen years working as an academic editor. He is the founder of VivaCoach, which helps doctoral candidates prepare for their vivas.

If you’re currently preparing for your viva, you’ll no doubt be thinking of answers to the questions you have a high likelihood of being asked. And one of those questions is guaranteed: “Please could you summarise your thesis for us?” It’s actually a great question, as it has the ability to put you completely at ease, letting you really engage with the rest of your viva and enjoy it as a result.

Note that I said has the ability to put you at ease. For years you have been living and breathing the body of research you’ve presented, and no doubt you could talk for hours about it. So, the challenge here is to compress all that knowledge, passion, and work into a short summary. That in itself can be daunting, but it is worth planning and practicing as you want to make sure you can cover all the salient points without being cut short by the examiners. Being able to summarise your work shows you are clearly on top of your subject.

You should aim to provide a three-minute summary (around 400 words). Think of it like a long spoken abstract. It gives you enough time to deliver a comprehensive overview of your research, identifying the focal areas, and giving a great first impression without waffling.

As with staring at any blank page, the hardest part is knowing where to start. Often students narrate their journey – the gap in the literature, how they designed their study to address it, concluding with their findings. A far better method is to invert this – start with your findings and work back. It allows you to state your claims before explaining the foundation you built them on. State your main findings, not secondary at this stage; you’ll have plenty of time to go over those in the exam.

This is my proposed structure (feel free to modify it to your needs):

1. What your thesis argues. (~30 seconds).
   ~70 words or 4-6 sentences.
2. The gap it addresses (~30 seconds).
   ~70 words or 4-6 sentences.
3. Your methodology (~45 seconds).
   ~100 words or 6-9 sentences.
4. Your findings (~45 seconds).
   ~100 words or 6-9 sentences.
5. Why they matter (~30 seconds).
   ~100 words or 6-9 sentences.

Now you have the structure, how do you condense all that knowledge into a few sentences? The best place to begin is just to get something down – write without your notes; you’ll be able to write much more than you thought. You can always amend it after.

Once you’re satisfied with each section (and this will vary from person to person – you may knock it out of the park on the first attempt, or you might find it taking days, and that’s ok), break it down into bullet points. This will allow you to commit the key points to memory. Furthermore, you can use them as a “cheat sheet” in the viva itself, if needed. In fact, if you’re anything like me, you might end up taking a lot of notes into the exam and find that you’re actually more on top of your material than you ever thought.

Because it’s a viva voce, you’ll want to practice reading the summary aloud. You’ll probably know from presenting your work in public that the sentences you construct on a page can be brutal to speak out loud! And of course, practicing vocalising your summary will also help you commit it to memory.

Record yourself on your phone. I know it’s uncomfortable, but it will put you in the shoes of the examiners. It’ll allow you to notice whether you came across clearly and convincingly, whether there was an over prevalence of “ums”, “like”, or any other signature filler. It’ll also allow you to recognise if, like me, you often speak too fast.

Constructing a three-minute summary has benefits beyond just preparing yourself for a question you know is absolutely going to be asked. Condensing your entire thesis into 400 words forces you to identify the most important aspects of your research. Many people find that they can summarise entire chapters but struggle when it comes to summarising their entire thesis into a few sentences.

Like with anything, the earlier you can start preparing the more confident and at ease you will be by the time the viva comes around. And remember, you are the authority on your subject, so use this opportunity to impress on the examiners how confident you are in your ability to clearly and concisely summarise all those years of work.