My journey to earn my doctoral degree is nearing its end.
On April 6, I defended my dissertation (a recording of the presentation can be viewed at the bottom of this post), and my committee approved of what I had done, which means I will now earn my degree and become Todd R. Vogts, Ph.D. (or Dr. Vogts, if one prefers).
My committee members did have suggestions for corrections, and I found all of those to be valuable. As such, over the following week, I made those updates. Then I had to submit my final draft to the Kansas State University Research Exchange (K-REx) database by April 14.
My dissertation is titled “What’s right (leaning) with Kansas media: The cultivation of misinformation in rural America,” and it can be found via the K-REx site at the following web address: https://krex.k-state.edu/handle/2097/43055
The final step is to actually graduate.
The graduate school commencement ceremonies will take place at 1 p.m. on Friday, May 12, 2023, in Bramlage Coliseum on the campus of Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.
However, this is not the end of this research. In fact, it is only the beginning. I have several ideas for extending the work I’ve done up to this point, and, as I’ve mentioned, I intend to continue in this line of inquiry. I firmly believe the topic is ripe for investigation, and I plan to continue harvesting research from this bountiful field of study.