Today is by far the worst day of my life. I just went through VIVA 15 hours ago and it was absolutely terrible. (warning: I have not slept for >24 hours so beware of high amount of typos and badly structured sentences)

First, I submitted my thesis on 30th May 2017 but due to my topic and country (rare topic + no expert in my 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.

Sorry you had a horrific experience. I did too. Took me a week to recover but 3 years on I don't even think about it, except to warn people to choose their externals with care! You'll be fine, take some time away from the thesis and then just bang out the corrections.

Sorry to hear. But you didnt get a R&R, cause that would entail another viva I think. You got major corrections, and you have up to 9 months to do them (means if you can do them faster, you can hand it in well before the deadline!).

Also, sorry to point this out, but 'worse day of your life'? I guess you never lost anybody and your family has been blessed with perfect health. lucky you.

Thank you for the clarifications. I guess I was too disappointed at the time i wrote the post. I lost my father when I was 3 and other than that, I am lucky to have a good and healthy family.

I'd say my viva was one of the worst times of my life too - but it's only a terrible week out of thousands of better weeks and I'm over it. I've had far worse experiences in other ways but it still ranks up there.

Lots of people are very involved emotionally in their theses for years so, yes, it is traumatic when these achievements are ripped from you. Don't belittle other people's experiences. People have the right to feel different things about different events.

I agree with this,Tree. My viva was horrible and it is still affecting me a year down the line - it is at least partly the reason why I've gone off in a different direction and not pursued academia since. I lost my faith in the system after realising you could have years of constructive feedback on your work and then get to the big exam at the end of it all, only to have someone go on an ego trip and kick all sorts of holes in you and your work just because they can. It wasn't character forming or whatever people say these experiences are meant to be, it was so brutal that I forgot about doing well and just focused on getting finished and out of there, and still the external kept kicking. I don't post much about this because we all have our own ways of getting over things, and I don't think it's necessarily helpful. But I agree that when someone's in the first throes of being upset at what is a major life experience, it's not helpful to tell them to get it into perspective.

To the OP, my outcome was the same as yours. The external apparently had all these major concerns about my work and wanted screeds of it rewritten, yet wasn't fussed about seeing it again and delegated that to the internal, who didn't share the concerns. I don't know if this is helpful, but my opinion now is that there was a lot of bluster from the external - if their concerns were so genuine, how come my thesis passed on the day and they didn't need to see it again? In the end, the internal helped me to minimise the changes needed anyway. Good luck with your amendments.

I have exactly the same feeling as you chickpea. I most likely will not go into academia, at least not in the next few years. I am very sure some examiners are there to fail the student and to show their superiority and to satisfy their ego. I am not sure why VIVA is needed if some external examiners are not interested in the thesis at all.