Hira Tareen
What looks scattered up close… becomes the most intentional path when you zoom out!
Meet Hira Tareen, a Psychology and Communication, Culture, Information & Technology (CCIT) student at the University of Toronto Mississauga…
Her journey has been shaped by one question:
“how do people actually take in information?”
Hira combined her two majors almost by accident… and it ended up shaping everything after!
Her path ran through bakery operations, a marketing internship with Caredara, and research at U of T studying how children process emotion and thought.
Different rooms… one lesson: understanding people comes before communicating with them!
Then came Orientum, an AI-enabled financial advisory firm, where she joined as an Accounting Intern… sitting in on how founders talked about their numbers pulled her toward something new: MARKETING.
Today, she serves as Orientum's Growth Lead for Marketing and Communications.
- At Orientum, Hira coordinates events from planning to execution.
- She grows the firm's presence beyond its existing network.
- She works on how the team communicates internally, because good work gets lost when the systems around it are confusing.
- The problem she cares about most goes beyond any single role: the gap between people who deeply understand something technical (like finance, medicine, or HR policy) and the people who have to make real decisions based on it without that same depth.
- Watching founders juggle tax, cash flow, hiring, and growth all at once taught her that what helps is not a simpler explanation, but an accurate one they can actually use.
Hira plans to build on her psychology and communication background to move into marketing and communications for AI-driven, tech-forward financial firms, where marketing has to keep pace with what is being built, not just package it after the fact.
Her story is a reminder that a path does not need to look linear from close to have direction. Sometimes the thread only becomes visible when you zoom out and look back.
On paper, my path looks a little scattered. But looking back, it hasn't felt random to me!