SENIOR PROFILE: Marissa Mazek

Not many students are able to justify learning the flying trapeze as part of their coursework.

But Barnard student Marissa Mazek—a writer, campus activist, and English department aficionado—managed to swing it. As part of her research for her senior thesis—a story about a girl who, in her aspirations to become light enough to fly, develops an eating disorder—the creative writing major scheduled a trapeze lesson. Hanging by her knees and turning flips in the air, Mazek hoped to experience the exhilaration of flying herself.

“It was one of the scariest things she’s ever done in her life, but it gave her so much insight into what she was trying to write about,” Mazek’s friend Hannah Schmidt, BC ’10, said. “It’s neat to know someone who’s so passionate about her work in that way.”

Mazek said she has been making up stories ever since she can remember. “I feel more like myself when I am writing,” she said. She’s been at work on a novel about factory workers in Argentina during the political upheaval of the 1960s since her senior year of high school. A Spanish speaker, she is an alternate for a Fulbright Scholarship to travel to Córdoba next year, where she hopes to fill in the gaps in her narrative by researching the lives of female Argentine auto workers during that period.

“She is an amazing combination of great kindness and enormous determination ... and almost limitless imagination,” creative writing professor Mary Gordon wrote in an e-mail. Gordon served as Mazek’s thesis advisor this past semester, an experience that Mazek said has been one of her most meaningful at Barnard.

The idea behind the story for her thesis was partially inspired by her own experience: After struggling with an eating disorder during her first year at Barnard, Mazek came to the realization that campus culture needed to change. The group that she helped to found, Students for Ending Eating Disorders, organized a week-long series of speakers, films, and other events for two years in a row. Its purpose was to bring to campus a greater awareness of eating disorders and other mental health issues, something that Mazek felt was missing.

“I feel like generally, in society, no one talks about mental health issues, particularly eating disorders,” Mazek said. The issue—one that she felt was particularly relevant to students on a campus where the standard, it often seems, is perfection—was “way too significant for us not to talk about.”

And while talking about her own struggles was difficult at first, Mazek has made a point of doing it anyway—she will share any detail about her experiences, she said, “if it can help someone.” Extending her writing beyond the creative, she authored a semester-long column in Spectator called “The Rough Truth” and urged her fellow students to love their bodies, themselves, and their peers.

“If it helped one person think about the way they live their life,” Mazek said, “or the way their friends live their lives, or about society’s standards of perfection, then my job was done.”