Hometown: Chicago, Illinois
Major: Clinical Psychology
Minor: Child Study and Human Development
Alvalyn is a senior from Chicago, IL, majoring in Clinical Psychology with a minor in Child Study and Human Development. At Tufts, Alvalyn has held leadership positions in numerous organizations, such as Black Student Union, DREAM, Ears for Peers, Parnassus, and more throughout her time. Additionally, she has been involved with the Diversity Admissions Team, where she engaged in on and off campus events as a Tufts representative for prospective students.
In her first year, Alvalyn hit the ground running in exploring her interests in media and representation research. In Tufts’s Child Studies and Human Development department, Alvalyn worked with Dr. Julie Dobrow on her Social-Emotional Diversity project which explored how a lack of representation, misrepresentation, and erasure in children’s media impacts adolescents’ social and emotional well-being. In her sophomore year, Alvalyn was promoted to Project Manager for this study and gained additional administrative research skills. Additionally, Alvalyn has held various research positions across organizations like the Center for Scholars and Storytelling, an organization centered on developing research tools that support content creators in curating authentic content for adolescents. As a Laidlaw Scholar and Tisch Summer Scholar, Alvalyn has found these research programs to be detrimental in framing her perceptions of research. Each of these research experiences has shaped Alvalyn’s intentions for future research, focused on more equitable mixed-methods research for historically marginalized adolescents and communities through the lens of liberation, cultural, and clinical psychology. She hopes to conduct future research that explores resiliency in adolescent maltreatment, particularly the impacts of physical and sexual abuse on youth from underrepresented backgrounds and their resiliency development.
These experiences have framed Alvalyn’s perception of research and its connections to the real world. This prompted her to work with the Black Aliveness program in Building Audacity which allowed Alvalyn to serve as a student teacher where she worked towards developing and implementing a course curriculum centered on Black history, culture, and experiences for high schoolers in the METCO program. These experiences have framed Alvalyn’s work and how she will strive to make change.
