CHS Announces Fall 23 Commencement Honor Roles: Mariah Alvarez, Graduate Student Marshal
Published November 20, 2023
By Darlene Muguiro
UTEP College of Health Sciences
This December, four CHS students will serve in honorific roles at the Fall 2023 commencement ceremony at the Don Haskins Center. These students were selected for their positions based on academic achievement, extracurricular participation, and community and University service. Our second story features Mariah Alvarez, Graduate Student Marshal for the College of Health Sciences.
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Mariah Alvarez, a candidate for the Master of Public Health (MPH) degree and proud third-generation UTEP Miner, says that she felt very emotional upon learning that she had been selected as graduate student marshal for the fall commencement ceremony.
“I felt like it was the closing of a chapter,” she said. “It made me reflect on my time at UTEP, and I was thinking that nothing is ever done alone – there was a lot of reflection, thinking about my family and friends, and my professors.”
Alvarez began her UTEP journey as a member of the first cohort of Terry Foundation Scholars, and ultimately graduated with her bachelor’s degree as a double major in sociology and psychology. She applied to the UTEP MPH program upon the suggestion of a doctor she was shadowing, who told her that it would help her applications to medical school stand out. In her first semester in the program, she was shocked at how great a fit the program was, saying that as soon as she found public health, “medical school didn’t matter.”
Alvarez says she always felt supported throughout her time in the MPH program, particularly with her thesis advisor, Dr. Oralia Loza, who maintains an open-door policy with her students and always made time to meet with Alvarez, and Dr. Julia Lechuga, who worked to find opportunities aligned with Alvarez’s budding interest in program evaluation. Alvarez’s peers in the Students for Public Health (SPH) organization were an equally important part of her community of support, watching her leadership skills grow as she assumed the roles of vice-president and, later, president of the organization. Under her direction, SPH earned the Student Organization of the Year award in 2023. Alvarez also received the Luxe Award from the UTEP administration that same year for her service and leadership.
“I think everybody deserves a chance to succeed, so in my role in SPH, I wanted to foster a change in behavior so that we were supportive of one another, because we were all going through the same things. And I think that we all became better for it,” she said.
Alvarez recently began a position as a Health Equity Fellow at the Association of State Public Health Nutritionists. After graduation, she plans to take a gap year from school, and is looking at positions in public health in the region. Ultimately, she foresees herself returning to school to complete a PhD and move into a position in program evaluation or academia. She is also considering beginning a nonprofit focused on LGBTQ+ health.
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Go Miners!
