Samantha Didrichsen, MSED.

Hello readers! It’s been a while since I last updated the blog, but I’ve been making minor changes to the research website here and there. Life has been particularly busy as I’ve started up my candidacy year at U.B!

First, I finished up on data collection for my dissertation in September! While I haven’t actively been recruiting anymore, I do still have interested parties finding my flyer online and completing collection with me. My energy though is not on recruitment and shifted to data analysis for a little bit. I actually had to pause that in recent months as well, as I’ve been on the faculty market and had interviewed at two different institutions for next year! Unfortunately, I wasn’t selected to continue with one, and the other one I’m still waiting to hear back from. It’s tough being on the market, but it’ll be worth it in the end, I’m sure of it!

I’ve also done some really cool things, like be interviewed on the Reflections of Fredonia podcast! I had so much fun over the summer at the Fredonia radio station talking about my time on campus as a student and what I’m doing now. I hope that you have a listen! And if you’re a Fredonia alum reading this and want to be interviewed, go to the link and in the description, you’ll find the contact information for the show! You don’t have to go to campus to be interviewed, they can do it virtually if you live too far.

Another thing I’ve done recently is do some very preliminary analysis on my dissertation data because I’m traveling to Kansas City, MO next week for the TED 2025 Conference! I was accepted back in June and I’ll be showcasing my early findings as a poster session on Thursday, November 13th at 3:00 PM. If you’re attending, come chat with me! If you’re not and would like to see my work, I’ve uploaded my poster to my Presentations page.

Otherwise, the semester is slowly wrapping up here in Buffalo, and I only have a few more months to finish my analysis and write my final two chapters of my dissertation. My hope is to be able to defend my findings in either March or April of 2026. If I don’t update this blog for a bit, wish me luck!