English At 50 | University of Waterloo

What is it like to work with someone famous? Since graduating from UW, Dr. Stephanie Fysh (BA 1987) has “worked with everyone from first time children's novelists to Prime Ministers.” Dr. Stephanie Fysh (BA 1987) currently works two jobs. One of these is as a freelance editor for a book publisher in Toronto. In this role, Stephanie edits general nonfiction, novels, and university textbooks and has had the opportunity to work alongside some famous people. She finds it very exciting.

In her second job, Stephanie is the Academic Coordinator of the Publishing Certificate Program at Ryerson University, where she teaches copy editing and proofreading. She sees a comparison in her work at Ryerson to her experience at UW; the courses she teaches takes a hands-on approach that she associates with Waterloo.

As a student at UW, Stephanie learned from her classmates who were co-op students that getting a traditional non-co-op education in literature did not necessarily limit one to a career as a teacher or writer. Although Stephanie started her career in the field of academics and believes that knowing that the traditional career paths are not necessarily the only ones has made her a better career counsellor to her own students.

For Stephanie, choosing to attend the University of Waterloo was an easy decision for a number of reasons--for example, she could stay in her hometown and attend a school with a good reputation that offered what she described as the “right balance of Humanities courses.” In addition, her parents both worked at the University when she was a student, so her tuition was slightly discounted.

At that time, Stephanie was looking to study both Theatre and English and began her studies majoring in both subjects. Majoring in English was an obvious choice for Stephanie. She had loved to read since the age of three and her love of English studies continued throughout high school. Stephanie was most excited about taking the second year required criticism course, The Practice & Theory of Criticism, taught at the time by Dr. Helen Ellis. She remembers appreciatively that the course looked at works from as far back as Plato until today. Stephanie especially enjoyed courses that gave her the opportunity to go deep into the study of particular authors. In one course she read all of Milton's works, in another all of Chaucer's. She sees these courses as having been a great opportunity to deeply explore the work of different authors and periods during her undergraduate degree.

Stephanie also fondly recalls living with an English graduate student whom she met by chance as the other was looking for a place to live.

Upon finishing her English studies at UW, Stephanie continued her education at the University of Toronto where she earned her Master's and PhD degrees. Her dissertation was on eighteenth-century literature and publishing history.

If she had it to do all over again, however, she might combine her English studies with courses in other humanities disciplines, as she learned in graduate school that all of the humanities connect.