{"id":79441,"date":"2024-05-02T01:00:33","date_gmt":"2024-05-02T05:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/?p=79441"},"modified":"2024-05-01T13:02:16","modified_gmt":"2024-05-01T17:02:16","slug":"senior-spotlight-isabella-villafuerte","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/senior-spotlight-isabella-villafuerte\/","title":{"rendered":"Senior Spotlight: Isabella Villafuerte"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Originally from Newton, Massachusetts, Isabella Villafuerte (CAS\u201924) has studied abroad in Madrid, participated in psychology research, and worked as a Facilities Supervisor at FitRec. She spends most of her time as a lab manager in the <\/span>Social Development and Learning Lab<\/span><\/a>, which studies how children react to the social world. As a lab manager, she assists with studies and trains incoming research assistants.<\/span><\/p>\n

After graduation, Villafuerte plans to obtain a clinical research assistant position. She is open-minded about what field of research she will go into, looking into topics from nutrition equity to clinical psychology. Eventually, she would like to focus on working with Spanish-speaking communities here in the U.S. In the future, Villafuerte sees herself working abroad, either returning to Madrid or living in Costa Rica with her family.<\/span><\/p>\n

Arts & Sciences<\/span><\/i> caught up with Villafuerte, who is majoring in psychology and minoring in business administration and Spanish.<\/span><\/p>\n

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Arts & Sciences: What led you to choose your major and minors?<\/b><\/p>\n

Villafuerte: I originally was a neuroscience and philosophy major, but I think I was more interested in the people and behavioral aspects, so I switched to psychology in my first semester of freshman year. I\u2019ve never looked back, I really like it. I love learning about people and why we behave the way that we do.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What topics does the Social Development and Learning Lab conduct research on?<\/b><\/p>\n

We research different topics around child development \u2014specifically, fairness, equality, learning, and the different social aspects of these child development topics. For example, we just did a study on fairness and how kids perceive fairness related to their emotions. Right now we are doing a study on risk and how kids perceive risk.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What was your internship in Madrid like?<\/b><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/b>It was super cool. It was at a group therapy facility in Madrid named <\/span>Federaci\u00f3n Alcoh\u00f3licos Comunidad de <\/span>Madrid (FACOMA). It was for people who have alcohol use disorder. It was so fascinating, I mostly just sat in on group therapy sessions because I wasn\u2019t equipped to moderate them. Even listening and hearing how people supported each other and hearing people\u2019s stories was so eye-opening for me.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What is your favorite memory from Madrid?<\/b><\/p>\n

The friends that I made and just being able to go get a coffee after class in such a cute cafe and going to get tapas with my friends after class \u2014just the little things that let us explore Madrid on a daily basis were really fun. It put me in a new place that I had never experienced before. The language especially was so cool because I grew up in Newton my whole life. Even though my parents speak Spanish, being surrounded by people who speak Spanish was fascinating and my language skills grew exponentially. I came in thinking that I could barely have a conversation with my family and I left pursuing a Spanish minor.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Hear more from Villafuerte in a new Senior Spotlight video<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Interview by Shelby Rose Long (COM\u201927)<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally from Newton, Massachusetts, Isabella Villafuerte (CAS\u201924) has studied abroad in Madrid, participated in psychology research, and worked as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21329,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79441"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21329"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79441"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79443,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79441\/revisions\/79443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}