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Ms. Marissa Fread (BA 2000)

     One of the eye-opening lessons Marissa Fread (BA 2000) learned while taking English courses at Waterloo was that it's important to look at something from the reader's perspective and understand how they may interpret it. She came to realize that she must do this in order to design anything successfully for an audience.

     Marissa also took a minor in Psychology, which, when paired with the understanding of readers’ perspectives that came with studying English, allowed her to hone her perception of human nature. As a co-op student, Marissa was given the opportunity to apply these lessons in an employment position as an ESL teacher for two terms, a job in which she encountered the struggles of immigrants in their journey to find a place in Canadian society. She heard stories from the families she taught about the everyday struggles that immigrants face when trying to improve their lives.

     Marissa found that English and Psychology complemented each other, and her favourite social psychology courses resembled the rhetoric classes that explored how attitude influences the ways in which “people respond to messages and other people.” Courses such as these helped Marissa to see through the eyes of readers, rather than focusing entirely on the writer’s point of view or “the text itself.” She learned to think both about the reader and the reader’s context as helping to determine how a given text is read, and to realize that texts often elicit responses that the author never intended.

     Marissa experienced a strange twist of fate in her last academic term when she could not take a course in Writing for Public Relations to complete her program requirements. Since it was unavailable that term, she took a course she thought would be “a complete waste of time” instead: The Rhetoric of Web Design. By the end of the term, she realized that she had enjoyed the class, and it ended up aiding her later on when she began working at RIM in web design.

     As a way of balancing her academic life with something more relaxed while at UW, Marissa played soccer and volleyball and coached figure skating for a few years.  She also worked for the school newspaper, Imprint, during her final years at UW.

     After graduation, Marissa was hired by Research in Motion to write content for their web sites, a job “which quickly turned into managing updates directly to the websites themselves.” Today, she continues at RIM as the individual responsible for user experience online, a position she enjoys because “it employs my knowledge and experience with human nature and allows me to examine why people react to online communications as they do.”