Laura Petro (C’16) to Speak at 2026 Communication Major Graduation

When Laura Petro picks up the mic in May as the communication graduation celebration speaker, she'll carry with her a message that it’s worth taking the risk of an unconventional path.

Petro, now VP of Brand and Fan Experience at Gotham FC — the reigning National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) Champions — didn't plan any of this. Not the soccer. Not the years at Peloton. Not even the confetti raining after the club won the NWSL championship parade that she helped organize.

In her role at the professional women’s soccer club, she leads the club’s marketing, content, creative, fan experience, game presentation, connecting with new fans, and fashioning the rituals that define matchday culture. Since joining Gotham FC in 2024, Petro has helped usher in a period of accelerated growth, including record-setting attendance and an elevated brand profile. 

Petro calls her career the “road less traveled”—a theme she hopes today’s graduates will embrace with confidence. “I didn’t know what I wanted,” she reflects, adding, “I knew what I didn’t want.”

That clarity came slowly. After graduating from Penn, Petro took a job at Peloton, long before it became a household name. She spent six years there, building things from the ground up. When COVID hit, and Peloton suddenly exploded in the cultural consciousness, Petro was already helping shape what the brand meant to the millions of people who'd found community through it.

“I was figuring out remote content production with different people in different cities across the world. It was an insane time," she says. "But the team at Peloton helped figure it out. That was the most rewarding part."

She left Peloton in 2022 to help take a small digital startup out of stealth mode. Then she got a call from her former teammate — Gotham FC needed someone. "I wasn't looking to be in sports," she admits. "But it was the combination of work that mattered and was meaningful to me, and the type of work I love — building from the ground up, shaping culture, and helping grow women’s sports."

Her Annenberg education, she says, gave her the tools to thrive. Even though she didn’t take a single marketing class at Penn, she felt well-equipped. Instead, she took courses on children and media, ritual communication, pop culture, writing papers on Kim Kardashian and first periods. Professors like Amy Jordan, Litty Paxton, and Paul Messaris helped shape her work.

"I'm more grateful for choosing communications the further along I get," she says. "It taught me to engage critically with culture.” That lens is what she wants to hand to this year's graduates.

Penn, she acknowledges, isn't always easy terrain for the undecided; she felt it too. "Six months before graduation, I was asking myself: am I a loser?" she laughs. "There's so much pressure to do the conventional thing."

Her advice is to embrace the risk. She adds that jobs will pay your rent, but don’t let that pressure you into the obvious path.

"Jobs at Google and Pepsi will always be there," she says. "But you have a window of time to find yourself."

And when the championship comes? “When you find yourself running on the field to hug the teammates, when you’re on the bus in New York with confetti falling, you know the winding road was worth every step.”