VIVA 101: What Happens When You Are Asked to “Show Your Work”

Most of the application process gives you a chance to show a final version or a final product. But when admissions officers look at that final product, they are often not actually impressed by the product itself. Instead, they usually have follow-up questions: Why does it matter to the student? What did they learn from it? What inspires them?

Questions like these have always been at the heart of everything we do at InitialView and our newest product, VIVA, is no exception. The name comes from viva voce, “with the living voice”, the centuries-old tradition of students talking with professors about their work.

How It Started

My boys are a year apart. When ChatGPT arrived in full force, my oldest was a junior, and my younger son was a sophomore, both in an IB program. Within a year, nearly everyone around them was using it. My co-founder (who happens to also be my husband) started asking the question: How can our kids demonstrate learning? What skills are going to matter in the post-AI world? That is when the seeds of VIVA were planted.

A few months later, we shared the idea at our Dialogue Council retreat where admissions leaders and educators had been describing the challenge of overly polished applications. When we showed the demo, Ashley Pallie, Caltech’s Dean of Undergraduate Admissions raised her hand and said, “If you build it, we will use it today.” Caltech became one of VIVA's first adopters, and when The Wall Street Journal reported on the Caltech admissions team's work this year, VIVA was part of that story.

How It Works

Students upload academic work they’re proud of in the form of a research paper, a science project, or even a video of something they’ve built. VIVA “reads” the work and generates specific questions based on what was uploaded. Students answer on camera, in real time. Seven questions are asked aloud, and the student has 60 seconds to respond to each question. Students can replay a question (which pauses the countdown timer), but the recording doesn’t stop. There is no prep time or opportunity to re-record an answer.

This might all sound a bit daunting, but it’s really just a chance for students to talk about the work they know well. If they did the project, they are already prepared. And what do admissions officers get? A sense of ownership and a window into how the student thinks.

What We Have Learned

Here is what surprised me. We built this platform to help Caltech verify materials. What I didn’t expect was to discover that the trial and error along the way might be the best marker of learning after all. There’s a reason why teachers want students to show their work.

The most compelling responses in a VIVA are rarely the most polished. They are the ones where the student laughs about a failure, or when a student reaches the edge of their knowledge, admits it, and asks the next question.

We’ve also confirmed that the why matters more than the what. A student who can explain what motivated them, what persuaded them, and why their argument changed is the type of student professors want in class. And best of all, students are proud of what they’ve learned. They’ve been wanting to share what they’re proud of all along, but until now there hasn’t been an authentic way to show the thinking behind it.

How to Prepare

Choose something you’ve worked on and are proud of: a research project, a science fair experiment, a robot or website you built, an extended essay. Re-read it and ask yourself what motivated you to do it, what challenges you faced, why it mattered.

Talk about it at the dinner table. What made you think that? Why did you make that choice? Who gave you feedback? And not knowing the answer? Treat that as the beginning of the answer. Have a conversation about it, but don’t write down any of these answers. The best preparation is not in memorizing potential answers. It’s getting comfortable with real-time engagement, thinking on your feet, and thinking out loud.

Everything else in the application process can now be produced and polished in seconds. What matters now is how you think about a question, a problem, a solution, and how to communicate your thinking and learning. My oldest is now working in a co-op at a fintech company. He had four online interviews before he was invited to the office. Not everyone can explain to someone how they got to an answer. If you can, that’s worth more than a test score or a GPA. Take the opportunity to show your work.