Lecturer of Public Relations, UMass Amherst

Grounded in the Arts, She’s Had Many Accomplishments of Note

Photo by Bob Zemba, Simple Truth Imaging

Sarah Rose Stack counts several mentors and influencers in her life — from her sister, Theresa, to her husband, Ryan, who has supported her in everything she’s done, to the accountants at the firm she would work for. But she always starts those discussions by referencing two music teachers — one in middle school and the other in high school.

Both inspired a passion for the arts that lives on today and influences virtually every aspect of her life (more on this later), but they did more than that. In short, they helped convince her that her challenging life — being raised by a single mother at or just below the poverty line, and at times homeless — shouldn’t limit her ambitions.

“They started to make me realize that I could be capable of something beyond just surviving,” Stack recalled, adding that they became surrogate parents in some ways, providing her with everything from quiet space in which to study and escape that home life to invaluable lessons on how teachers need to support their students in any way they can — lessons she applies today as a lecturer of Public Relations at UMass Amherst.

“That’s why there’s food here, there’s drinks here … I have a very, very, very open-door policy,” she said while talking with BusinessWest in her office at the Integrated Learning Center. “I have a student who’s not in any of my classes anymore, but she asked me to help her pick an outfit for an interview and do practice questions … that means a lot to me when students reach out to me like that, and I always try to be there for them.”

Stack has taken a circuitous route to her current position, putting aside music and the arts (at least as a profession) after coming up one credit shy of what she needed to graduate from UMass Amherst with a music degree as she tried to balance school and life, and thus being unable to speak at commencement, as she was chosen to do — although she would go back and do it later when she earned that degree.

This otherwise dark moment ultimately helped shape her in a positive way by taking her down a different career path — working first as an executive for the billion-dollar e-commerce company SHOP.COM, then for the Holyoke-based accounting firm Meyers Brothers Kalicka (MBK) and, eventually, UMass.

Today, Stack balances life at home with work (including the Stack Group, the consulting firm she co-owns with Ryan), the arts (on many different levels), and involvement in the community, squeezing every hour out of every day — except Sunday, which is reserved for family.

Indeed, while providing guidance and support to her younger son, Ethan, with college applications and her older son, Jordan, as he pursues a legal studies degree at UMass Amherst, she teaches three courses at the university (four next semester) while also managing several interns.

“They started to make me realize that I could be capable of something beyond just surviving.”

Meanwhile, she’s teaching dance one night a week; choregraphing a production of Sweeney Todd at the Little Theatre of Manchester (Conn.) set for November; preparing to star in a theatrical performance she couldn’t name just yet, opting only for ‘razzle dazzle’; and laying the groundwork for the return of a program she created called Build a Prom, which provides prom dresses, suits, and accessories to those in need. And that’s just a partial list.

She’s also a consultant to MBK on marketing matters and serves as a role model and mentor to students, young professionals, and artists of all kinds. Katrina Arona, her successor at MBK, is one of them.

Sarah Rose Stack (pictured with her husband, Ryan) says she strives to be the kind of game-changing teacher she had while studying music in her youth.
Photo by Bob Zemba, Simple Truth Imaging

“She plants the seeds with me, and I sprout from there,” Arona said, adding that advice has come on specific marketing initiatives as well as broad realms of working with people and solving problems. “She’s like that good player on a soccer team that enables everyone around her to play better.”

Sound Advice

When Stack says she couldn’t take anything for granted growing up in New Jersey, she means it.

And that includes having a place to live.

“I probably moved more times before I was in high school than most people do in a lifetime,” she recalled. “I Iived in a hotel for a little while, and in a church for a little while, with family, with friends.”

She said her mother worked three jobs to support her three children and, understandably, wasn’t around much.

Which brings her back to her music teachers. One of them, ‘Mr. Lorreti,’ got her started in music and gave her a euphonium, a close cousin of the trombone and tuba, which she would go on to play in several bands and focus on in her college major. Then, in high school, there was a teacher known to all as ‘Mrs. G,’ who helped her manage those difficult years.

“I consider myself an accomplished artist in music and dance, and I got a lot of my fundamentals from my music teachers with regard to technique,” she explained. “But they were there for everything. I remember being so stressed about getting homework done … the house was crazy, and I was allowed to go to the music room and work on things during off periods; she [Mrs. G] would never tell me to leave. I could go there for a quiet moment and work on an English paper.

“Those arts teachers … they give you so much than the lessons,” she went on. “My mother was a single mom raising three kids and working three jobs, so we rarely got to see her. She worked so hard, and she did her best. But it’s interesting how these arts teachers were like second and third parents.”

Stack had a few music scholarship offers, including one to Rutgers, but chose to pay to attend UMass Amherst for its strong faculty and institutions like its marching band, which she never did play in because she was involved in so much else.

She took on school in aggressive fashion, accruing far more credits per semester than the norm, while also meeting Ryan, also a music major. She became pregnant her junior year, took a year off to be with her son, Jordan, and then returned to school to finish, but, as noted earlier, came up one credit shy due to some challenges with balancing life and school.

“Things were different then — people weren’t so accommodating with non-traditional situations,” she explained. “One of my required classes started at 8 a.m., but childcare didn’t open until 8:30. That was problematic. Two times a week, I would drop Jordan off at 8:30, park in the football lot, and sprint to this class 40 minutes late.”

“They really showed me how to set boundaries for myself. They told me that if I don’t take care of my whole person, I’m not going to be a good employee. That was such a shift for me, and it stuck with me.”

She passed the class but, as noted, couldn’t take the final, in-person exam, and thus couldn’t speak at commencement and had to put aside her dream of playing euphonium with the ‘The President’s Own’ United States Marine Band.

“I took some time off, and that was when I just thought … ‘I hate music, I hate everything,’ and I started working for SHOP.COM,” she said, noting that she started in sales and worked her way up to director of Business Integration.

It was a job that took her around the world, and she enjoyed most aspects of it, but as her children grew older, she desired something more grounded. So she took the job at MBK as director of Marketing and Recruiting, thinking it would be the “the most boring job I ever had.”

But it wasn’t. It was another learning experience on many levels, and one where she would gain more confidence and life skills.

Sarah Rose Stack (in the pink cap) leads one of the many dance classes she teaches weekly.

“They really showed me how to set boundaries for myself,” she noted. “They told me that if I don’t take care of my whole person, I’m not going to be a good employee. That was such a shift for me, and it stuck with me.”

The Next Stage

Always seeking new challenges professionally, Stack found one in the School of Journalism at UMass Amherst. There she teaches “Writing for PR,” “Research & Analytics,” “Social Media for PR,” and other courses while also trying the follow the lead set by the teachers who were so impactful in her life.

While her career has taken her to the corporate world and then academia, the arts remain a huge part of her life — performing, choreographing, teaching, mentoring, inspiring, and also playing in a few orchestras, including one featured in a recent performance of Shrek.

As noted, she teaches dance — everything from ballet and pointe to ‘Broadway jazz’ — one day a week at Nutmeg’s Dance & Theatre Co. in Southwick, where she’s taught for 20 years.

She also choreographs shows for several area groups, including the Little Theatre of Manchester, the Opera House Players, Renbrook Prep School, High Wire Acts, Seat of Our Pants Productions, and the Massachusetts Academy of Ballet. Specific performances include A Chorus Line, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Grease, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Little Mermaid, and many others.

While work and the arts are separate worlds for Stack, they interconnect in many ways, especially with the way in which her training in the arts has made her better in her more recent career roles.

“All of my music and dance training played a huge role in all of my marketing and design choices,” she explained. “When you think about video design or storytelling, writing, or any of that stuff, the cadence of things … where there’s space, where things speed up, where things are longer than they need to be — all of that is very musical to me.

“When I write something, I’ll always read it out loud and say, ‘does this sing? Does it sound monotonous, or does it sing? Are there good pauses? Does it flow nicely?’” she went on. “It’s the same with video design when it comes to how things move, physical space, tempo … all those things play a huge role in how things are visually processed; I do think there are a lot of transferable skills.

“If I were to do a doctorate, this is exactly what my dissertation would be on,” she continued. “Dance and music as a universal language as it relates to behavior change.”

Pausing for a moment, Stack seemed to take that ‘if’ out of the equation, making it sound far more like ‘when,’ as in maybe a few years from now, when there might be a little more time.

That will be the latest challenge for someone who has never shied away from one, and, in fact, always looks for the next one.

That’s just one of the myriad traits that has enabled her to excel on many different stages — both figuratively and literally — and take a bow in December as a Woman of Impact.