Mariam Vahradyan

After Mariam Vahradyan (Master of Applied Positive Psychology `24) completed a bachelor’s degree in psychology, she spent a few years working in education management: first for the largest children’s book publisher, Scholastic, then for a nonprofit in Yerevan, Armenia—the city where she was born and where she was excited to return after residing in New York City for most of her life. “I’d been in that corporate culture for a few years, and I really missed learning and talking about ideas and concepts in nuanced ways,” she reflects. Her search for an intellectual challenge led her to the Foundations of Positive Psychology Specialization in Coursera. “I got kind of excited from the course, and I wanted to dig in more because there were so many branches of the field, and I thought there must be so much behind each of these layers,” she says. In Penn’s Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program, Mariam had the opportunity to dive deeply into the discipline—and, in the process, discovered the research interests that would lead to her next professional journey. “I was initially thinking about positive psychology concepts through the education angle, but then I realized that in my career up to that point, my focus wasn't necessarily just education but storytelling,” says Mariam. “And the cross-cultural aspect of storytelling was really important for me—because I have been in Armenia for the last few years and had grown up in the diaspora abroad, being a part of these different communities while not necessarily feeling like I was fully a part of this or that one.”

Mariam was accepted to the MAPP program, and the program director, Dr. James Pawelski, called her personally to tell her she had been awarded the Christopher Peterson Memorial Fellowship—an authentic and personal touch that embodied the positive psychology ideas about connection and authenticity that Mariam had been learning online. In addition, the scholarship allowed her to focus fully on the degree program, rather than trying to balance regular international visits with work. “MAPP is a pretty significant chunk of time, and it's a commitment,” says Mariam. “I didn’t want my studies to suffer, or to be overwhelmed with stress.  I had to do this exercise in my head to determine which pillars in my life I needed to dial down. This gift of the fellowship supported me to lower the work dial so that I could balance everything else, and I feel really lucky.”

As coursework progressed, Mariam began to develop her research interests. “The key things that I came back to were around meaning—and how meaning can be made in challenging times—and cross-cultural research,” she says. “There were times where we talked about creating interventions and the importance of adjusting them to the context of the population that you're working with.” Mariam also particularly loved learning from prominent positive psychology experts, such as Emily Esfahani Smith, a leading thinker in meaning research who would become Mariam’s capstone advisor, and Dr. Barbara L. Fredrickson, who visited and spoke to students during a MAPP on-site session.  For Mariam’s cohort, the monthly on-site sessions alternated between the virtual campus—which Mariam attended 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. in Armenia—and the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia. “Although the on-site weekends were exhausting, they allowed me to connect with people and I felt very engaged,” she recalls. “They opened up way more questions—which for me is a good sign. I felt so lucky and so intellectually stimulated.”

For the MAPP service learning project, Mariam’s group worked with a nonprofit organization called What's Your Grief? which provides resources for grievers, grief professionals, and those supporting grievers. “MAPP gives you the tools to be able to understand and navigate the positive psychology world, and then it's up to the individual to go out into the world and adjust these concepts and interventions in an evidence-based manner,” she says. “For the service learning project, we ended up creating a strengths-based workbook for What’s Your Grief? that they are now implementing into their online platform. The research that went into this project and the skill of customizing interventions is also something that I'm using now in the work I'm doing in Armenia, and it ended up being super relevant to what I later studied for my capstone.”

Mariam’s capstone project had two parts: a literature review of research around narrative, the importance of negative emotion, and meaning-making (for which she was able to build on her service learning project work), and a qualitative study based on seven interviews with people of Armenian descent living in the US. “My topic was about how the actual process of storytelling promotes psychological flourishing and reflects the resilience of the Armenian people who are living outside of Armenia,” she explains. “When I conducted the interviews, I realized that the interviews themselves created an opportunity for these people to share their stories and engage in this powerful process. They wanted to keep talking. It was one of the most meaningful writing experiences that I've had, and I was really moved that it had an impact on the people who kindly volunteered their time.”

As she completed her degree, Mariam began consulting for The Armenian Spiritual Revival Foundation, which is piloting interventions for people in Armenia who experienced displacement and loss as a result of the 2020 Artsakh war. “What I'll be doing there is helping to create a journey for people who have acute PTSD symptoms as a result of the war, and helping them re-author a pro-future life story,” she says. Drawing on interventions developed by the Dulwich Center in Adelaide, Australia, co-founded by David Denborough, Revival combines narrative therapy with spiritual and active historical thinking techniques to help people strengthen community bonds, establish a feeling of safety and security, and promote agency and well-being. “My role is to bring that positive psychology lens and to infuse the interventions with the PERMA theory of well-being and concepts around resilience and post-traumatic growth,” says Mariam. “These are things that are relatively new in Armenia. There's some stigma around mental health and creating a space where people can talk about these tremendously difficult times, so that's something I'm excited to help normalize.”

Mariam also co-founded a nonprofit called Kaitzak designed to connect diaspora communities around the globe. “Right now, we are focusing on spotlighting nonprofits and individuals who are doing really important work in the diaspora, amplifying flourishing communities, and trying to shift narratives away from the deficit model of thinking,” she says. The organization will offer educational events and webinars, and eventually workshops that draw from the narrative techniques and cross-cultural research that Mariam explored in her capstone. “This is obviously a different population than we have with Revival,” she says. “So you have to adjust your goals, your activities, and even what you want to have as the outcome.” But Mariam now has substantial experience adapting positive psychology concepts to different audiences and contexts—like when she spoke at the UNIS-UN International Student Conference at the United Nations General Assembly. “They gave me the opportunity to speak about gender equality and education for an hour with over 700 international students from around the world,” she says. “At that point, two months before graduation, I had the language to talk about concepts like agency and resilience to high school students in this amazing space—not as a lecture, but in a way that was relevant to the conference and to this group of students.”

“MAPP was the necessary boost I needed to reexamine my future and expand my horizons,” Mariam concludes. “It’s made me rethink my relationship to work and to think about new goals.”