Category Archives: optometry

I now more-or-less exclusively reach for my iPad for both reviewing documents (papers, agendas, minutes etc.) and when I need to have information available at my fingertips for meetings and the like. Increasingly, I seem to receive paperwork for meetings as a single, often long, PDF which is great.  This file format is, of course, is the digital lingua franca for bringing together documents which were originally generated from a range of programs.

Sometimes, though, I have the very first world problem of needing to review some work which is presented as a number of files of one or more formats.  Today, for example, I was about to board a plane (a prime paper reviewing opportunity) and recalled that I had recently been asked to review a paper for Contact Lens and Anterior Eye.  I pressed the various on-screen buttons to accept this invitation and was quickly able to download the five files – four Word documents and one image.  To generate a single PDF for airborne review would mean converting the Word files individually in some way and then either adding the image or converting them separately.  A bit tedious; and also slow when the queue was already beginning to form at Gate 206.

Some time ago, I found the easyPDF web site which allows you to drag in a bunch of files and it quickly generates a single PDF file for download.  As a default, it adds the the files in alphabetical sequence so some changing of file names might be required but apart from that, it works perfectly.  There is an iOS (and presumably an Android) app to act as the front end for this, also.  The site allows conversion of up to five files as part of its free tier.  It does other conversion magic as well although I’ve not used those other features.

I have previously struggled with methods to automate this process on my Mac (PDF creation means shoving information through a printer driver rather than a simple conversion process) so this is a much better solution which can easily be done when on the move.  The system is cloud-based so may not be suitable for sensitive of confidential documents but for other bits of work, it’s a great option.

Leaving aside that the term viva is a bit of a funny one (the important bit of viva voce is missed out; I’m sure it should be pronounced v-eee-va and not v-eye-va; there was a now-considered-hilarious 1970s car of the same name) this oral examination is a key part of the postgraduate research assessment process. In the UK at least, it remains essentially the only way in which the work of a PGR student is examined.

To head off on a brief tangent, this is not the case in Australia or the United States. In the former, at least in my direct experience, three external examiners receive copies of the final thesis and provide detailed written comments which go to a panel which gathers all the opinions and comes to a final verdict.

Students in the US defend their work but this part of the process can be something of a formality and it’s perhaps not quite the same as the traditional see-the-whites-of-their-eyes all-or-nothing high adrenaline British method.

Anyway, the approach I have used myself over the years as an examiner is to read through the weighty tome and make various comments in a separate word processing file and perhaps add various Post-It notes into the thesis to keep track of the key pages. This method comes with a large administrative overhead. For example, you are obliged to type something like ‘Change the term ‘staining of the corneal epithelium’ to ‘corneal epithelial staining’…’ in your list of recommend amendments. Repeat. Many times. It’s burdensome and it does my head in, as the kids say.

Last week I had the opportunity to run the whole process on my iPad. Theses are now routinely provided to examiners as PDF files, and so it was a simple process of using a PDF annotation app (I’m currently using iAnnotate but there are lots available) to work through the report, making edits, adding comments and so on. It was a breeze to work through these during the viva because the program has a button which allows you to advance sequentially through the edits. Extra thoughts and ideas were noted as we discussed the work and it all ended up added into the PDF.

At the conclusion of the process, the student needs to see the examiner comments and again, it was trivial to email a copy of the comments and edits. In fact, the automated email included the annotated PDF and a separate list of each change. This is much better for the examiners, but also an improved situation for the student who receives a more informative list of changes more rapidly.