“I really want to try to help every student where they’re at individually, because I did live through a lot of those same things,” says Michelle Sullivan (COM’95). Photo by Melissa Schrenker

Accolades

COM’s Michelle Sullivan Named 2025 Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching Winner

“As somebody who was never planning to be a teacher, to be honored for teaching excellence is really surprising. And very humbling,” former advertising exec says

Michelle Sullivan grew up middle class in southern New Hampshire. Her dad drove MBTA buses and Green Line trolleys. Her mother was a homemaker for many years and later worked with special education students. Sullivan got into Boston University in the 1990s, but sometimes felt like a fish out of water among students with more money and more savvy.

Eventually, though, something clicked. An internship led to a job at an ad agency that led to a 17-year stint helping Sam Adams climb to the top of the beer world and adding successes with Twisted Tea and Truly Hard Seltzer.

In 2018, Sullivan (COM’95) came back to the College of Communication as a professor of the practice, mass communication, advertising, and public relations. And now she will be recognized at Boston University’s 152nd Commencement on May 18 as the winner of this year’s Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching, one of BU’s highest awards for faculty.

“It’s pretty cool, right?” Sullivan says with a grin. “As somebody who was never planning to be a teacher, to be honored for teaching excellence is really surprising. And very humbling, because I’m surrounded by excellent teachers. And exciting.”

Students and faculty nominating Sullivan for this year’s Metcalf Award cite her real-world pedagogy and her focus on helping every student succeed. That’s in part because she was the first in her family to finish college.

“I remember feeling different from a lot of my peers, who seemed to know about a lot of things that felt like they were in a secret vault to me,” she says. “It felt almost like, as a first-gen student, getting to BU was the big goal, and then, all of a sudden, all of the secret doors were going to open. But what I realized was, there was a whole new set of challenges to figure out.”

Her peers seemed to find internships and jobs through parental connections and alumni networks.

“I didn’t really understand that at all, and that was an intimidating process for me,” says Sullivan, who is also an associate dean at COM. “And I can see students still face some of those same challenges. Some students face other challenges, which I haven’t necessarily experienced, but I can empathize with because of my own experience. I really want to try to help every student where they’re at individually, because I did live through a lot of those same things.”

Gerald Powers, a COM professor of public relations when Sullivan was a student, helped her land an internship at Bishoff Solomon Communications, a Boston firm owned by two COM alums, and that became her launching pad in the industry. Earning a BS in mass communication, she graduated a semester early to save money. The agency had an opening and hired her. 

One of the first accounts she worked on there was an up-and-coming business from the other coast that was looking to go national by changing the very image of its product.

A little company called Starbucks.

“Starbucks at that time was a very romantic, sort of mystical brand because it was only in the Pacific Northwest, and there was not yet a coffee culture in the US, right?” she says. “We made coffee at home or if you were out, you’d have to go to McDonald’s or a gas station to get a coffee. That was before the more European sensibility for coffee that Starbucks brought forward into America, and our agency got hired to launch the brand as it spread on the East Coast from Maine down to Maryland.

“Working on Starbucks helped kind of bolster that love for beverage in me and that sense of working on brands that have a bit of a connoisseurship, a craftsmanship, to them.”

Hold that thought.

Sullivan went on to work on a wide variety of accounts at Bishoff Solomon, and she did well. One of her coworkers, another BU alum, Lisa Lamontagne (COM’97), remembered her after leaving for an agency in New York. Lamontagne passed along Sullivan’s name when she heard that Boston Beer Co. was looking for an in-house marketing person. 

After 13 interviews, she was hired in July 2000 and stayed for 17 years, working closely with Boston Beer founder Jim Koch and eventually rising to head of brand management.

“For most of the time I worked on Sam Adams. It was a really exciting time to enter the beer business,” she says. “Jim Koch had the same vision for beer, the beer category, that [Starbucks founder] Howard Schultz had for coffee. Jim really wanted to change the way Americans saw beer and help people understand that it has nobility and it doesn’t have to be just something fizzy and yellow that you leave behind after your college days. He really wanted to create a different niche. And so I was able to be part of that whole craft beer revolution.”

The team struggled for years to try to figure out what the right advertising campaign would be for Sam Adams, “until we came to thinking about what was core to our brand,” she says. Skipping funny, Hollywood-style commercials and celebrity endorsements, they decided to shine a light on “who we really are and what we do as a brewer and what our values are.” The documentary-style campaign was all black-and-white footage, backed by roots rocker George Thorogood’s “Who Do You Love?”

The signature campaign she helped create, “Take Pride in Your Beer,” ran for seven years, not exactly the norm in the fast-paced ad world.

“It was just the real employees and real consumers of Sam Adams,” Sullivan says. “And we would get to the heart and soul of the brewing process and the quality standards and the people and the passion and pride they had behind what they did. And it worked and it changed the entire beer category. The company tripled in size.”

Her success was such that Koch put her in charge of boosting the Twisted Tea brand and then launching a new category with Truly Hard Seltzer. “Which came out right around the same time as [competitor] White Claw,” she says, showing a touch of that old competitive spirit. “I think we were working on it before then, but they got it to market about a month before we did.” Clearly it still rankles.

She “absolutely loved” her 17 years with Boston Beer, she says, but reached a personal “inflection point” amid America’s political divisions, mass shootings and racist violence, climate change, and natural disasters. 

 A different path

“I’d been working for over 20 years and I was thinking, well, the world is kind of crumbling around me and I’m just marketing beverages. Is there a different path?” she says.

At the time, Sullivan was working 60 to 70 hours a week and traveling constantly, while raising young kids and navigating a long commute. She couldn’t figure out her next act until she got off that “hamster wheel.” So she saved some money and decided to take some time off to be very intentional about her next step. Maybe she’d work for a political campaign or a nonprofit, something on one of those issues that she cared really passionately about.

“I was getting really concerned, for lack of a better word, and angry and sad and frustrated. And I started to think to myself, what can you do to make a difference? So I decided to leave Boston Beer without a job—my parents and everybody around me were like, What is happening?”

One of her old COM profs, Tobe Berkovitz, now a professor emeritus, advertising, was heading the school’s mass communication department, and had been asking her to come back and be an adjunct faculty. While she was working? No way. She was a loyal donor and guest speaker and met with students for informational interviews, but teach? No.

Until she left Boston Beer. She called Berkovitz and ended up with a visiting professor gig. “I thought that would be a good bridge between, you know, just having some money coming in and doing some important work while I figured out what my next full-time job would be,” she says. “I really did not expect that to be teaching.”

Funny thing happened, though. Her career had been spent in mass communication, developing campaigns that went out to thousands or millions of people and hoping that it moved the marketplace. In the classroom, she was communicating with people individually, and she could see the results without a survey or a quarterly report.

“The moment I stepped into the classroom, I could just really feel that impact I was making,” Sullivan says. “And I loved it from the very beginning.

“I was like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe this is only going to be for one year. I feel like I’ve found my dream job. And luckily for me, a few months into it, they posted for a permanent full-time faculty member to join in my area. So I applied and was lucky enough to be hired. I took the full-time slot in the fall of 2018.” 

She credits another of her former teachers, the late Chris Cakebread (COM’82, Wheelock’00), a COM master lecturer, as instrumental in helping her thrive in the classroom. Since joining COM, she’s earned a reputation for working hard to make every student in her classes feel like they are part of what is happening, to meet each of them where they are and lift them up in a way that key mentors lifted her. 

“I try to get to know each student on an individual basis and figure out what their concerns and challenges are so I can help them navigate through it,” she says. “Candidly, back then, I wanted to kind of hide the challenges I was having. And I think now students feel much more comfortable being authentic and talking openly about the differences they face. Everybody, everybody has challenges. And I want them to have a professor there who is looking them in the eye and really understanding what’s in their heart and what’s on their mind.”

It has also allowed her to find the new sense of purpose she was seeking when she decided to leave Boston Beer.

“I feel that with the students, I can feel that ripple effect, right? That change that I wanted to make in the world,” Sullivan says. “As opposed to thinking, all right, well, I’m going to work for one politician or I’m going to run for office myself—as a teacher, you can create ripple effects in the world by the people you touch and the impact that they go out and make.

“Before I got to the classroom, I didn’t understand or fully appreciate the impact that a really passionate educator could make. And I’m just so grateful that I got that opportunity,” she says. “I don’t play the lottery, but if I did hit the lottery somehow, I’d still want to keep teaching because I really, really love what I’m doing so much, and I feel really lucky to be here.”

The Metcalf Cup and Prize and Metcalf Awards were established in 1973 by a gift from the late alumnus and Boston University trustee Dr. Arthur G. B. Metcalf (Wheelock’35, Hon.’74), to create “a systematic procedure for the review of the quality of teaching at Boston University and the identification and advancement of those members of the faculty who excel as teachers.” This year’s Cup and Prize winner is Tina Durand, a clinical associate professor of applied human development at Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.

Find more information about Commencement here.