system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Thesis Defense

Is it typical for your thesis defense to be incredibly brutal? I recently had mine and the presentation went well, but when it came to the q&a portion, it was miserable. They dug in so deep! 

Thankfully, I passed and my mentor said that they purposely asked me difficult questions because they knew I could handle it. Is that a true statement or was he just trying to make me feel better? What is the typical mindset of a committee?
gpt
Varies enormously. Not unusual. Also your perspective as the one who was being "attacked" probably made it feel worse.

If your work is published, it's usually not as bad at the defense. Not because they give you a pass for being so good at scholarship, but because you've already been through a rigorous review.

Questions can be:

1. evaluatory, making sure you fully understand the broad context and details/limitations of work you're presenting. Also aimed at getting better explanations for anything you shared confusingly so that they can both understand it properly and make sure you do too. These can be hard or easy, but a prepared candidate should be able to answer most of them.

2. challenging, making you explain or defend the specific choices you made when multiple different options to approach the scholarship existed. Why this? Did you compare to that? There are not necessarily wrong answers, the goal is to demonstrate that you did this thoughtfully.

3. curiosity, taking your conclusions and just being interested in them and the implications. There are some of these you should anticipate as natural extensions of your work (but out of scope for your thesis because you have to graduate before solving everything), and some that could totally throw you for a loop - especially if they are deeply informed by your committee's own research interests.

You should expect some of each at any defense.