I passed!!!!!!!!!!

I am sooo happy! I just came out of my half-way point viva and I passed.

The interim assessment marks the half-way point in the PhD, it requires a 4000 word report and a viva (mine was 1 hour long). Unfortunately I couldn't fit everything I wanted to into a 4000 word report so mine was more like 12000 words.

I wasn't sure whether a report which was 3 times longer than it should be would impress the judges or just annoy them as they would have to read more. They seemed to quite like it.

The viva was the hardest part, some of the questions covered extremely broad topics: biology, physics, electronics, chemistry...you name it, it was all in there.

I did my research before I went in. I learnt about the backgrounds of each person who would be judging me and made sure I found out how my report would be relevant to them, making sure that I had some stock answers ready; I'd say these only helped me about 30% of the time.

Overall they said I had completed some very novel research but had concerns that I had too many loose ends to tie up by the end of the PhD. I guess I agree with this to some extent and it has been a useful experience to get some feedback from people who have gone through this process themselves.

I feel like there's a little bit of an anti-climax now, I'd been nervous about this for the past week and now I've passed it's like "great, get on with the next one and a half years now". Anyway, I'm quite excited about where I go from here now and have plenty of ideas to keep me going.