When she returns to campus for this year’s Homecoming celebration, two-time alumna Susan Packard will become two-time Homecoming Grand Marshal Susan Packard, and after rain forced the cancellation of her first parade in 2019, she’ll finally have her opportunity to cheer alongside thousands of Spartan friends as she rides through the streets of East Lansing.
A graduate of the College of Communication Arts and Sciences with both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in advertising, Susan’s first entry-level job in the emerging world of cable TV grew into an award-winning career at the tippy-top of today’s household-name media. She was on the original startup teams for HBO and CNBC. Later, as co-founder of Scripps Network Interactive, she helped build and run networks you’ve absolutely heard of, like HGTV and the Food Network, to name a few.
Along the way, she channeled her lifelong love of writing into four published books, and used her platform to help uplift and advocate for other aspiring leaders—especially women—in the workplace.
As MSU’s fall 2019 commencement speaker (another accolade that she holds near and dear to her heart), Susan told the class of graduating Spartans to always remember that “what you do” is not “who you are,” and that you can be an accountant or a teacher or an engineer by trade, but that it’s what you do as a human, outside the workplace, that completes you.
This year, MSU celebrates Susan’s return to the role of Homecoming Grand Marshal as her complete self: a successful alumna, certainly, with an amazing career that makes our university proud. But more importantly, as a philanthropist, a passionate advocate for MSU’s Collegiate Recovery Community, and a friend to anybody who is on the journey to recovery and hoping to find a home at MSU.