S. Worthen | Weblog

...is one where you find out your wife's pregnant the day before. The defense is kind of trivial after that, and you don't end up getting stressed. But perhaps this may not be the approach for you. :-)
I had three examiners in my (UK) defense: the external, who was a new professor from York who'd just come into academe after a distinguished career in industry, the internal, who was in my field (CS) but not my area, and an internal chair (also a professor) due to OU regulations on the examining panel needing a certain number of defenses under their belts.
They started off by asking me to give a summary presentation of the thesis, which was a good way of getting me settled into the defense, then graduated from relatively gentle questioning to several quite probing questions. I had a couple of times where I had to think for several minutes before answering. Only one gee-my-thesis-has-a-gaping-hole-in-it moment, and it quickly became apparent that the hole wasn't that big.