Successful dissertation or thesis writing involves attainment of a series of painstaking milestones: initial topic selection, writing your prospectus or introduction chapter, writing a literature review, developing methods, APA editing and formatting, and so on. Through each key step, intense review and critiques from your committee require that you push yourself to bring your manuscript to its fullest potential. It’s exhausting work, and as so many of our dissertation assistance clients share as they approach the finish line, you get to the point where you just want to be done!  

But, after all of this work to obtain approval of your thesis or dissertation manuscript, you will face one last hurdle before obtaining full approval: the oral defense. In most cases, there will be oral defense sessions for both the proposal and final dissertation. The format of the defense session is typically two-part: (a) a presentation of the dissertation to the committee by the candidate, and (b) a session during which the committee poses a variety of questions about the study to the candidate. Each of these two segments taps different skills, so it will definitely help to prepare for both. Following are six key tips to help you prepare for your dissertation defense.

Tip #1: Find Out How Long Your Presentation Should Be

With all of the effort it requires to get the dissertation manuscript ready for approval, many of our dissertation assistance clients simply don’t think to ask how long their defense presentations should run. But trust us, it’s super important! Most dissertation committees or university programs have pretty specific expectations for presentation length, and these can vary quite a bit from one committee to the next (Di Pierro, 2010). Our dissertation coaches share that the oral defense can range from 20 minutes to a full hour, which of course has implications for the material you prepare.

When presenting your proposal or dissertation, you definitely don’t want to run short. For example, a 15-minute presentation will certainly not suffice if your committee is expecting a half-hour. However, running long is a problem as well, and some committees may actually require candidates to stop their presentations once they hit the time limit. In the worst cases, this results in a drastically incomplete presentation that does not address all required segments of the study. So, do your legwork and find out what length of presentation is required, and then develop your materials accordingly.

Tip #2: Practice Your Presentation Through Mock Defense Sessions

As noted previously, it is important to plan your presentation so that it meets the length requirements specified by your committee. A great way to determine whether your presentation is the appropriate length is to practice. Practicing alone can help you to gauge the length of your presentation, but practicing with a friend, colleague, or dissertation coach may help with any jitters you have related to public speaking. In fact, doctoral graduates who had completed their defenses expressed that practicing through a mock defense was the most helpful form of preparation (Lansoght, 2021). This type of mock defense can also help you to practice your responses to potential committee questions. In fact, our dissertation coaches often provide mock defense sessions to our clients for this very purpose. 

As you mentally prepare for your oral defense sessions, keep in mind that your role in this session is the “expert” on your thesis or dissertation research. After all, you are the one who spent innumerable hours developing the literature review, planning your quantitative or qualitative research methodology, completing qualitative or statistical analysis, and discussing your results in relation to relevant literature and theory. Your committee has guided you along as you developed your research skills, and their role is to certify your status as a fully-fledged researcher. But, it may help to build your confidence to remember that you know more about your own study than anyone. You should definitely try to communicate that confidence as you present your study to your committee.

Tip #3: Create a PowerPoint Presentation

An essential element of your dissertation defense is a PowerPoint slide deck that will accompany and guide your presentation. As you develop your presentation, it may help to keep in mind that there are two distinct audiences or users of the presentation: you, and your committee. The slides should be developed primarily for the committee, and you should include brief bullet items for key points to help committee members to follow your oral presentation. Don’t make the mistake of pasting lengthy segments of your dissertation into your slides and then reading off the slides verbatim—you’ll put your committee to sleep if you do this! Editing those lengthy segments down to short bullet statements will help to create a more engaging presentation style.

This doesn’t mean that you have to completely memorize your presentation script. For your own purposes, you should develop the notes section for each slide to keep you on track with your oral presentation (Di Pierro, 2010). Depending upon your style, you may choose to develop speaker notes for each slide that are more or less verbatim renderings of what you plan to say. Or, you might prefer to create a series of bullets with main ideas, and then just fill in the rest as your present. This depends upon how comfortable you are with “riffing” in front of an audience, so make sure you prepare based on your own needs. Many of our dissertation assistance clients simply outsource the PowerPoint development to our dissertation consultants as part of their proposal or final dissertation editing process, and we’re happy to help you to prepare in this way if you’d like!

Tip #4: Practice Answering Typical Questions—Proposal 

After you deliver your oral presentation, you will open the session for questions from your committee. To prepare generally for their questions, reviewing your proposal or dissertation thoroughly is highly recommended (Lansoght, 2021). It is likely that your manuscript has been in preparation over a lengthy period of time, so it’s definitely important to take the time to refresh your memory!

As your committee members will not tell you in advance which questions they plan to ask, it will help to review some typical questions asked by committees and rehearse your answers to these. For the proposal defense, questions are more likely to be focused on the reason for the study and the variety of choices you made while planning the study. Common questions often center around the research problem, gap, and methods (Chen, 2011). Our dissertation coaches suggest preparing for questions such as:

• What is the problem your study will address? For this question, review your problem statement so that it is fresh in your mind, and make sure you don’t confuse the problem with the research gap. You will need to explain the adverse effects of the problem and whom it affects.
• What is the gap in knowledge your study will address? For this question, explain briefly what is known about the problem and then what is not known—this is your gap. It is also important to explain that other researchers have noted the need for additional research on this topic.
• Why did you choose your research method and design? Be able to briefly explain why you chose a quantitative or qualitative research method given the nature of the problem and research gap. For example, if using quantitative methods, it might be that determining relationships between variables through statistical analysis was essential to contributing new knowledge. If you chose qualitative research and analysis, perhaps you needed to explore participants’ viewpoints in great depth to address the research gap most effectively. You should be prepared to provide a similar explanation for your choice of research design.
• Why did you choose this population and sampling procedure? You should also be able to explain why it made the most sense to sample from your chosen population using the approach that you selected. For example, qualitative research often uses a purposive sampling approach, which ensures that you only include those who are most qualified to answer your research questions thoroughly. If you are conducting statistical analysis, however, you should explain how your sampling approach promotes generalizability of your results.
• What motivated you to examine this particular topic? This question taps into your personal experiences (e.g., in the workplace) and how they inspired you to investigate your topic. Our dissertation coaches suggest that you use this as an opportunity to demonstrate an understanding of how research can be used to promote positive social change by addressing problems in real-world settings. 

Tip #5: Practice Answering Typical Questions—Final Dissertation

For your final dissertation defense, your committee may ask questions about any part of your study, including those areas discussed above that relate to the proposal. But, our dissertation coaches suggest that in most cases, the final defense will focus most heavily on your results and their implications. It will still help to prepare for questions about choices you made during the proposal phase of your study, but emphasis will likely be placed on questions such as the following:

• In everyday language, describe what it is that you found through your study. For this question, try rehearsing a succinct explanation of the statistical analysis results that does not involve any of the jargon (e.g., significance, p-values, etc.). If you conducted qualitative research, prepare of brief description of the key themes you found through the qualitative analysis.
• How did your theoretical framework help to interpret your results? The theoretical framework is the explanatory thread that holds your dissertation together logically, so be sure to understand how your results made sense (or didn’t, if applicable) within your framework.
• How did your results add something new or address your research gap? Remember that the need for additional research on your specific problem was what justified your dissertation topic, so it will be important to explain not just what your statistical analysis or qualitative analysis revealed, but also how those results contribute additional knowledge to the research literature.
• How might your findings change policy or practice? If you think back to your personal motivations for conducting the study, it is likely that there is a real-world setting that you wanted to improve through your research. Now that you have your results, how might those be used to make changes to policy and/or practice in those settings? Think about how your findings might help to reduce or eliminate the problem in everyday life.
• What were the limitations? Every study—your dissertation included—has shortcomings, and you should be prepared to discuss a couple of these and how they affected what you can conclude from your results. For example, if you conducted qualitative research, you might talk about how small samples may limit the generalizability of qualitative analysis findings, or you might acknowledge that qualitative findings cannot speak to relationships between variables—only statistical analysis can provide such results.
• What are your recommendations for future research? To answer this question, you need to make specific suggestions for future studies that may help to clarify or expand upon your dissertation’s findings. Our dissertation coaches suggest that you explicitly connect your recommendations for future studies to aspects of your own study that invite further inquiry, such as limitations, delimitations, or unclear or surprising results.
• Knowing what you know now, if you were to go back and start your study all over again, what would you do differently? The dissertation process is largely about learning how to be a researcher, and so you might expect questions such as this one that ask you to reflect on the developmental aspects of your journey. Maybe recruiting enough online survey participants to meet sample size requirements per your power analysis took way longer than anticipated. Or, maybe you felt that your qualitative analysis would have had richer findings if you had conducted longer interviews. Whatever the case, your committee will want to see that you are a better-informed, more skilled researcher now that you have completed the dissertation.

Tip #6: Consider Professional Assistance to Prepare

Our last tip is to reach out to the experts for assistance if you need it. Many of our dissertation consulting clients who attend online universities have shared that they do not always receive as much support from their committees as they might like, and we are definitely here for you if you need someone in your corner during this last major challenge in your doctoral journey. Many doctoral candidates reach out for professional editing services (Di Pierro, 2010), and our dissertation coaches can augment this support by providing a one-hour practice session that allows you to deliver your presentation and then field several of the typical types of questions that committees ask during defense sessions. We can then provide feedback on aspects of your performance to work on before your actual presentation, so that you’re well prepared when the day of your dissertation defense arrives. We’re happy to help in this way, and we’ll be even happier to hear the good news when you pass your defense with flying colors!

References

Chen, S. (2011). Making sense of the doctoral dissertation defense: A student-experience-based perspective. In L. McAlpine & C. Amundsen (Eds.), Doctoral education: Research-based strategies for doctoral students, supervisors and administrators (pp. 97-114). Springer.

Di Pierro, M. (2010). Preparing for the oral defense of the dissertation. ASQ Higher Education Brief, 2010, 1-5. https://asq.org

Lantsoght, E. O. (2021). Preparation for the doctoral defense: Methods and relation to defense outcome and perception, Preprints, 1-31. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202109.0481.v1