As it’s been this entire academic year, I’ve been pretty quiet on the blog. I’ve been finishing up interviews, analyzing quantitative and qualitative data, and writing (and re-writing) my final chapters to my dissertation.
It’s my pleasure to announce that on March 11th, 2026, I passed my final defense.
I won’t lie, I was pretty nervous. There’s only so much information that my brain can hold in a single setting, and I felt that I needed to remember as much as I could about what I even wrote to answer the Q&A from my committee.
Thankfully, this was very much a conversation about my study. Once things started and I began to answer some questions from the audience first, I began to relax and realized that I did know my study and that this wouldn’t be bad.
It was a day of celebration. Immediately after we all left my defense, Wes and I went to the Hofbrauhaus and had a grand ole’ time with great German food and beer that was as big as my head.
At this time, I’m taking the next few days (maybe even a week) to continue to decompress, relax, and sit with the fact that I earned my PhD. Eventually I’ll need to address the feedback that my committee left for me on my dissertation, but we have some time for that. I’m actually waiting to hear back if a proposal of mine based off of my dissertation will be accepted for a journal publication, so that feedback will be especially important for that.
Once my dissertation is available in the U.B dissertation database, I will include the link to it on my site and on my CV.
Thank you all my accompanying me on this journey. I’m excited to see where this takes me next!
Samantha Didrichsen, PhD. 