Setting Assists

Photo of Lily Durwood courtesy of Gil Talbot.

Written by Nicole Yurchak

Senior Lily Durwood, a setter on the women’s volleyball team, was never a stranger to Harvard’s athletic community. Durwood’s father is an alumni and her grandfather, Stanley, played both football and wrestled during his years in Cambridge. Following her grandfather Stanley’s example, Durwood became involved in sports at an early age. She picked up a volleyball in fifth grade and started playing on a team two years later. Soon she found herself practicing three times a week. Her hard work and dedication to the sport have paid off as she entered her senior year at Harvard with the third most assists in program history. Her success on the court combined with her performance in the classroom earned Durwood Academic All-Ivy League and ESPN The Magazine Academic All-District honors as a junior.

Although her academic and athletic achievements mean a great deal to her, Durwood feels some of her greatest rewards come from her work with her peers. Durwood, a psychology concentrator, takes a lot of pride in her position as a Drug and Alcohol (DAPA) Advisor on campus. She has been doing this since her sophomore year of college. “I kind of wanted to get involved in something that was helping people in some way. It’s definitely a great program,” Durwood said. “DAPA is geared more towards the university community as a whole—outreach to the whole campus. We do different publicity events,” she explains.

Last summer Durwood stayed on campus and created a program on alcohol with two other DAPA peer advisors for Katie Koestner. “She[Katie] coined the term “date-rape,” Durwood explained. “She does a lot of speaking about date rape and started a whole company who does speaking to high school students.” Koestner’s company is presenting the program around the country at different schools.

Despite her success as a DAPA Peer Advisor, Durwood wasn’t gaining as much hands-on-experience as she would have liked. Because of that she joined a peer counseling group on campus. The name of the group must remain anonymous for confidentiality reasons but Durwood says that she really enjoys her work there. “I love peer counseling because you get more one-on-one interaction [than with DAPA]. That’s kind of what I’m hoping to do in the future.”

Durwood points out that it will take her seven more years to get her PH.D to become a therapist, so she appreciates the opportunity to be able to apply her skills now.

Friend and teammate, Kat Kocurek thinks Durwood will make a good therapist. “She is always willing to talk with people for the sake of company, and as easy to talk to as a psychologist --she's a psychology concentrator, so go figure,” says Kocurek. “Lily endlessly provides out of the box insight to situations.”

When she is not volunteering with DAPA or peer counseling, Durwood continues to be of assistance to people at Boston Children’s Hospital, specifically with those that have gender identity issues. After taking a class last fall in abnormal child psychology, she wrote her final paper on “gender identity” and cited the work of Dr. Norman Spack, a specialist at the Boston Children’s hospital and a Pediatrics Professor at Harvard’s Medical School. Durwood claims she “was so moved by the things [she] found while writing the paper” that she started researching the topic further. Eventually, Durwood decided to email Dr. Spack, who is well known for his groundbreaking work with patients from all over the world who have gender identity problems. “I went and met him [that] spring and just parlayed it into a summer job. I worked part time for him four days a week this past summer,” she says.

Durwood explains the research she is conducting with Dr. Spack is important since, “Boston Children’s is one of the more progressive hospitals” [in dealing with these kinds of issues]. She especially appreciates the controversial nature of Dr. Spack’s work with these gender variant patients. “He does extremely progressive and pretty controversial hormone treatments for kids that want it or need it,” Durwood added.

When asked why she is drawn to such a divisive area of study, Durwood explains, “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender studies is sort of a marginalized group. I feel like LGBT in particular, is the new frontier of the civil rights movement because there’s just such a tiny percentage of the population that is transgender and their voices aren’t really heard.”

Durwood maintains that the therapist in her is rewarded just by hearing peoples’ stories. That gratification has caused Durwood to decide that she is not really interested in “doing the kind of psychology research where you’re sitting in the lab and running tests on patients. The kind of stuff they make you volunteer for in psych 1 and stuff like that.” Overall, Durwood finds clinical research the most rewarding because of the direct and immediate impact it has on helping people.

Right now, Durwood is not able to help patients one-on-one; however, she does get to see many pre-teens and adolescents who seek Dr. Spack’s expertise. She says that while each day and every patient are different, she has observed many of the kids that come to see Dr. Spack often do so because they are suffering from depression as a result of not being accepted by their peers. Most of the time this prevents the child from “being who they really are” until later in life “because there is so much adversity facing them” in society.

One noteworthy example is Chaz Bono (formerly, Chastity Bono) who recently captured the public’s attention because of her sex change. Durwood is not surprised by this development because “there is such a fine line” trans-gender people encounter when contemplating a sex change. “Traditionally, there have been more male to female trans-people than there have been female to male because as a lesbian you can assume the role of a male easier than a gay man can assume the role of a female,” she explains, noting that facing such difficulties tend to bring out a lot of “negative” behaviors in the patient.

Durwood hopes to study this problem further in graduate school but admits that it could be tough. “The problem is there just aren’t that many schools that have this focus. They [only] have professors that do research on the topic so I’m really going to have to buckle down and find a hand full that do because I do think this is what I want to keep doing.”

For the immediate future, Durwood says since she finds sex and gender disorders so fascinating she will try to stay involved by continuing her work with Dr. Spack until she finds a graduate program that fits her needs. Durwood will also continue helping her peers at Harvard, working with both DAPA and peer counseling during her last year in Cambridge.