A liberal arts education means being able to change direction. Holly Irion ’09 started as a geology major. Later she planned to attend graduate school for counseling psychology; “I took an intro to psychology course and just knew it was for me,” says Holly, a Queensbury (NY) High School alumna. She later took an intro to gender studies course; now a gender and sexuality studies minor, she has combined the two concentrations in an intriguing way.

The summer of 2008 granted her the opportunity to bring her University Fellowship proposal to life. Irion spent the season on campus exploring the role of social networking Web sites in the presentation of female adolescent sexuality.      

“I was looking at the ways that adolescent girls use sites like MySpace and Facebook to present their own identities online, and relating it to the moral panic that’s been going on recently,” she explains.  She dove right in. Creating a research student MySpace  account that gave her access to public sites, she analyzed everything from the pictures teenage girls chose to represent themselves and how those choices relate to the media, to the tastes in music portrayed.  Her focus was on conceptions of childhood innocence, a topic that has extended into her senior honors thesis in gender and sexuality studies.

“I can understand why people are afraid,” Holly says. “Things that are usually kept quiet are now public -- but I think that’s a good thing.” She has a 35-page summation paper, including a four-page ethics section, to support her findings that teenage girls are more interested in expressing identity than sexuality.

In addition to her research, the 21-year-old studied in Australia in the fall of 2007, is involved with the Campus Wellness Initiative and the Advocates program, and is a hammer and discus thrower for the women’s track and field team.