The thesis project merges interdisciplinary research to develop a self-directed creative intervention for immigrant youth, allowing them to make sense of their social and cultural identities. It takes research on self-awareness, multicultural identification, perceived belonging, and bibliotherapy to create a guided journal titled "Unearth," filled with art and writing prompts that are age-appropriate for adolescents and that serve as avenues for self-exploration. The project ultimately engages a focus group discussion to understand the usability and accessibility of the intervention.

The United States houses only five percent of the world’s population but over 20% of its prison population. There has been a dramatic increase in carceral numbers over the last several decades with much of this population being people with mental illness designations. Many scholars attribute this phenomenon to the process of deinstitutionalization, in which mental health institutions in the U.S. were shut down in the 1950s and ‘60s. However, disability scholar Liat Ben-Moshe argues that this is a dangerous oversimplification that fails to credit the deinstitutionalization movement as an abolitionist movement and to take into account shifting demographics between institutions and prisons/jails. This study considers how mass incarceration in the U.S. stems from a trend of isolating and punishing BIPOC and people with disabilities at disproportionate rates as it explores lived experiences at the intersection of mental health and incarceration. Findings inform an abolitionist agenda by highlighting the near impossibility of rehabilitation and treatment in an inherently traumatizing space.

The Founders Lab is a team-focused, exploratory Barrett Thesis project that allows students the opportunity to discover and utilize their “inner entrepreneur”. This project empowers teams of students to come up with a business idea; create a strategic business model; conduct research on a target market; generate a brand style, logo, and other marketing-related materials; meet with business professionals as a way to receive feedback; and finalize a business plan with tangible deliverables. This project in particular focuses on the creation of an app that allows users to connect with others in competitive esports tournaments and participate in tutoring sessions for financial incentives. Throughout our experience participating in the Founders Lab, we were able to construct this business pitch.

Suicide is a significant public health problem, with incidence rates and lethality continuing to increase yearly. Given the large human and financial cost of suicide worldwide alongside the lack of progress in suicide prediction, more research is needed to inform suicide prevention and intervention efforts. This study approaches suicide from the lens of suicide note-leaving behavior, which can provide important information on predictors of suicide. Specifically, this study adds to the existing literature on note-leaving by examining history of suicidality, mental health problems, and their interaction in predicting suicide note-leaving, in addition to demographic predictors of note-leaving examined in previous research using data from the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS, n = 98,515). We fit a logistic regression model predicting leaving a suicide note or not, the results of which indicated that those with mental health problems or a history of suicidality were more likely to leave a suicide note than those without such histories, and those with both mental health problems and a history of suicidality were most likely to leave a suicide note. These findings reinforce the need to tailor suicide prevention efforts toward identifying and targeting higher risk populations.

Manchester United and Leeds United are two of the English Premier League’s most popular and historically successful clubs, and together constitute one of English football’s most interesting and inexplicable rivalries. English popular opinion claims that this rivalry is based on the Wars of the Roses and the royal houses of Lancaster and York, so this thesis engages with this idea and analyzes the rivalry's connections to this medieval historical event. Furthermore, the top flight English football league's evolution into the English Premier League brought social and economic changes to the sport, both at a broad and ground level, and this thesis finds out how much these changes affected this rivalry. All in all, this thesis analyzes medieval, social, cultural, and economic historical connections to one of English football's most unique club rivalries.