Marie Swab (’24)

Marie is a fourth-year Penn State student from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, studying Psychology. She is interested in the development of personality across multiple cultural contexts, as well as the association between personality characteristics and deviant behavior. Marie would like to understand how and why people engage in deviant behavior through a career as a forensic psychologist. She plans to integrate professional and psychological training to help individuals reintegrate into society with new skills and improved functioning.

Marie is an undergraduate research assistant (RA) in the Context and Development Lab with Dr. Dawn Witherspoon. As an RA, she is gaining valuable research experience in adolescent development. The position also allows her to be a part of a positive and collaborative team of people with similar interests. In the lab, she has worked on the PARADE project, which evaluates how African American youth in Harrisburg interact with their parents and how they engage in the spaces and environments around them. In this role, Marie has collected data from Black adolescents and their parents, both virtually and in-person, using surveys and interviews to ask participants about their experiences. Marie is also member of the Three Cities Project, where she has worked with a senior graduate student and another undergraduate researcher to examine interviews of low-income adolescents to understand how they characterize and perceive their relationships with individuals from different contexts. She has coded interviews, written interview summaries, and helped develop the emerging themes from the data. Marie, along with the rest of the Three Cities Project team, will be presenting findings from this work at the upcoming Society for Research in Adolescence meeting in April 2024. They hope to publish their findings in a journal article. Marie’s experiences at Penn State have solidified her intention to pursue graduate education through a clinical psychology program, which she looks forward to after graduating.

In her free time, Marie teaches CPR classes, enjoys watching Criminal Minds, and plays the clarinet.

The CSC wishes Marie all the best in her future academic pursuits!