Julianne Rodriguez is a second-year transfer Anthropology major involved in the Lemelson Anthropological Honors Program under the guidance of her faculty mentor, Dr. Brooke Scelza. Her research project is a cross-sectional, multi-generational study of women in the Southern region of Malawi that examines the social norms around early marriage and childbearing and documents patterns of reproductive decision-making. She conducted 78 interviews of grandmothers, mothers, and girls in and around the Zomba District that encompassed family history, patterns of behavior, and ideals for family structures. Each participant also responded to a vignette on the appropriate life choices for women in their community to reveal what they expect of young women. The dominant discourse around early marriage is that the truncation of education that often comes with early first births is bad for young women. Recent work takes a more nuanced approach, looking at the costs and benefits of these decisions using both individual and a family-centered lens, and finds that the optimal choice for women is more complicated than originally addressed. Her study illuminates some of the many complex factors that influence how women structure their lives under stressed conditions in sub-Saharan Africa and addresses how they balance issues of personal safety and well-being, family needs and interests, and romantic endeavors.