COVID-19 gave Alana Silva-Cacdac and those close to her ample time to reflect. The senior psychology major at Carnegie Mellon University saw friends in social isolation examining their gender identity. Silva-Cacdac wanted to know how the isolation experienced affected one's gender identity and began a research project to better understand this novel situation.
The pandemic upended Silva-Cacdac's early college experience. A first-generation student, she planned on attending community college and applied to several top-tier schools just to see if she would be accepted. With aid from programs like the Tartan Scholars, which helps meets the needs of high-achieving students from limited-resource backgrounds, she chose CMU, though a first year of virtual classes was not the college experience she had envisioned.
Silva-Cacdac still made the most of isolation, identifying a research topic that she would follow through the rest of her undergraduate career.
"The research we have now establishes that gender identity is formed around puberty, influenced by the ideas and gender of your peers and the social barriers you have. There's also a self-reflection, the interaction between your social environment and your personal, private identity," Silva-Cacdac said. "During COVID, that whole social part was taken away. You didn't have an audience to perform your gender to. I think taking away that audience made people reconsider how they represented themselves."