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Ms. Chris Ditner (BA 1984)

     If there is one thing that Chris Ditner (BA 1984) learned at Waterloo, it is the importance of good storytelling. As the Vice-President of Marketing and Innovation with Ketchum, a global Top 5 public relations agency in Atlanta, Georgia, she has seen many times the rhetorical impact that the right story can have on the market for a product. In her position, she specializes in “Women and Technology,” which involves studying how women think about and use consumer technology and social media. “When you work with technology products, no matter how well known the brand is, you need to be able to craft a compelling story if you want to persuade reporters to write or consumers to buy.”

     As a co-op student at UW, Chris learned that “there is a place in the real world for good communicators, no matter how obscure our studies.” She found it jarring to juggle courses on Beowulf and Chaucer with work terms at computer companies and the government, but she loved the experience of being a co-op student. Through her work terms, she learned that there was a connection between her studies and the professional world, for the art of storytelling was common to both. “Everyone responds to it, and the world's greatest businesses are masters at it.”

     Linguistics was one of Chris's favorite classes at UW because she had never encountered anything like it before. Professor Harry Logan was highly entertaining and offered a strange, yet enjoyable, new way to look at the language she had been speaking all her life. “Who knew that even slang was governed by rules?”

     Chris recalls her first summer term on campus, when she and a group of other co-op students bonded through their mutual belief that the term imposed an unfair workload on students (they all would have rather been at the beach). “We named ourselves the Black Bituminous Gurge in homage to Paradise Lost, one of the many pieces of required reading we didn't read that summer.” By August of that term, the group started staying up all night to prepare for final exams. “After trying to speed-read a whole term's set of assignments in a single night, we piled into the group's only transportation, a decrepit sedan with holes in the floorboard, and parked outside Tim Horton's until it opened so we could consume enough caffeine to stay awake for the exams.” Because of that memorable term, she still keeps in touch with members of the Black Bituminous Gurge.

     After leaving UW Chris studied at UBC, where she discovered that she enjoyed the workplaces she experienced as a co-op more than academics. She left her studies at UBC to become a technical writer at Netron, a software company in Toronto. She found that many of her fellow UW students also worked in similar capacities for the same company.

     Chris sees her experience as an English co-op student as what got her to where she is today, doing a job she loves. Her work-term experience was primarily in the technology industry and piqued her interest in the field. The courses she took in linguistics, logic, and psychology taught her how “to break things down into parts and then see how they can be built back up to create persuasive communications.”