Her thesis scared her, but the prospect of starting an R & B music career in risky New York doesn't.

ALEXIS TOOMER LEANS BACK, lays her Dr. Martens shoes on the table and giggles. She can do that now; she's graduating today.

As she speaks in her fluid, clear voice and flashes her small, charming smile, Toomer is the very picture of relaxation.

But for the first seven months of this year, the picture was a bit less tidy. Writing a senior honors thesis in History and Literature, Toomer experienced an emotional catharsis like none she had endured before.

Sixty-five pages of text? No problem; that's just a junior paper times two. Nights devoted to microfiche and Micros World? She could handle it; "ten thousand men" and women of Harvard had before her.

But nightmares and midday flashes of terror. This, the aspiring pop music diva hadn't bargained for.

Toomer was writing an "interpretive analysis" of lynching in the post-civil war period. For her, a well off Black woman raised in the sunny splendor of Southern California, the project became a painful trip into a violent past she had never before confronted.

"I came across an article on lynching [in the spring of 1992]," Toomer says. "I had no concept of how brutal and horrific it could be. It was an image I couldn't leave behind. I thought the best way to work through my feelings was to write about it...I forced myself to think about it even though it was so horrifying."

But Toomer says in the end the difficulties were well worth it. The project became an achievement in both academic and personal terms, a timely opportunity to question her identity.

"It came at a time in my life when I was wondering about taking risks, finding what was important to me," says Toomer, who acknowledges that she considered abandoning the project mid-way in favor of a more traditional topic. "Do I want to devote myself to things I am passionate about or things that I can be rewarded for?"

This was the first time, she says, she had to "think consciously about taking risks...in a significant, profound, personal way."

But the essay was by no means her first experience with taking risks. In fact, Toomer's life to this point has been about creating opportunities and choosing the path most suited to her, no matter what the consequences.

At an early age, she decided, to the shock of her parents, that she wanted to be a star pop singer. She began cultivating a trembling, soulful sound that eventually won her jobs in Paris nightclubs and made her a prominent voice on the Harvard campus, starring in musicals, soloing with a cappella groups and making appearances at jazz and rock shows.

Toomer is heading to New York next year to try her luck in the music business, and she concedes it's a big risk for a woman from the suburbs. Then again, for this brash, impetuous and very talented woman, there's nothing new about that.

UNTIL THE FOURTH grade, Toomer had her career track pretty much decided: the cute eight-year old from Northridge, California planned to become a brain sargeon. But one day, she walked into the kitchen and made a surprise announcement to her parents. "I said I wanted to be a singer, and they were shocked. I hadn't sung before," Toomer recalls.

She wanted to try out for a community group called "A Show of Hands," which performed for deal children. Her parents consented, and she made the troupe.