Today is by far the worst day of my life. I just went through VIVA 15 hours ago and it was absolutely terrible.

First, I submitted my thesis on 30th May 2017 but due to my topic and country, my VIVA is on the 1 year anniversary of my submission date so you can imagine my rust on the thesis itself. It lasted 3 hours. The external examiner was horrible. He only focused on methodology part and ask very detailed and difficult questions including asking me to compare a paper is very marginally related to my topic (not even closely related) that i read years ago and have totally forgot about (not included in my list of reference). Furthermore, he questioned my thesis to the point of doubting whether I am the one running the empirical analysis. I even had to ran through the entire estimation process (luckily I brought the laptop that has all of the softwares required). At 1 point he referred to certain part of my thesis that requires some additional model specifications as "that part is bullshit" and said why are you so bad? I lost my confidence completely to the point that I could not even answer some simple questions after that.

Luckily the internal examiner was much milder and only require some further explanation on certain parts and correct some mistakes. However the internal examiner seemed to be influenced by the external and became quite critical in the end.

Then came another bad news: My faculty has adopted a new policy in which I need to rearrange the entire thesis to a different format.

In the end, I need to do some major correction and need to send the amended copy to the internal only (does that count as resubmit?) in 9 months time. Thankfully I do not need to send to the external for approval. Still, this is the worst experience (by far) in my entire life. I honestly wish to just let this damn thesis go and forget about academia completely and move on. Thank you all for reading my long rant.