How Wharton Center turned a Broadway fan into a campus leader

The first time Katelyn Kraemer walked into Cobb Great Hall, she was 16. Her parents had surprised her with tickets to “Mean Girls”—her first show at Wharton Center, and her first time on the MSU campus. 

"Michigan State wasn't really on my radar," she says. "I worried I'd get lost." 

She didn't. Four years later, Katelyn is the president of the Wharton Center Student Marketing Organization—WCSMO—and she has spent her entire college career inside a building she first visited as a teenager. She's now a triple major. She was the student-assistant director of a musical for the Department of Theatre her junior year. She's a resident advisor and a content creator with a following large enough to draw brand partnerships. Somewhere in there, she also worked her way up through WCSMO, from social media co-chair to vice president to the president role. 

WCSMO connects MSU students to the business of performing arts. Its roughly 25 active members meet weekly at Wharton Center, travel to New York and Chicago annually for professional development, and earn points toward show tickets by staffing events and promoting performances. The organization, which was student-founded, has run for more than two decades. 

For Katelyn, who came in thinking psychology was her career path and theater was a passion on the side, WCSMO turned proximity into opportunity. The New York trips put her in rooms with Broadway marketing professionals. Some of the people she met along the way work at the agencies that market the shows she grew up watching. 

"Having those opportunities right down the street from me at school is unimaginable," she says. 

Lisa Brinker, Wharton Center's director of marketing and communications, has watched Katelyn rise through the organization. The moment that told Lisa what kind of leader Katelyn would be happened at the 2025-26 season’s college night during the Broadway touring engagement for Clue. Both Lisa and the WCSMO president at the time had to leave early, and someone needed to close down the event. 

"I looked over and thought, well, Katelyn’s running this—there's no question," Lisa says. "I had no qualms whatsoever." 

Past WCSMO presidents have gone on to careers in the field; one joined a Broadway touring company as a press rep. Katelyn hit the ground running: she asked to start the first week of August and arrived with a list of ideas before she’d officially begun. 

What she wants for her year as president is, in part, to give the students behind her what she found—more time bonding as a group, and more time with the Wharton Center staff who she’s come to know. She’s thinking about what she leaves behind as much as what she takes with her: connections the next members can lean on after she graduates. 

Katelyn’s favorite thing about Wharton Center isn’t the trips or the resume it’s helping her build. It’s the office, where the staff know every WCSMO member by name. “There's always a warm greeting; it’s always a welcoming space,” she says. “It’s not just a performing arts venue. There’s a huge community aspect to it.” 

It's the same thing she tells prospective students on the campus tours she leads—that a place this vast only matters once it stops feeling big, whether that’s Wharton Center or Michigan State University.  

“You can make the big place small,” she says. “But when you make it personal, that's when it becomes home.”