Beth Ward – 2025 Alumni Fellow

By Grant Guggisberg

In working for Hallmark Cards for more than 25 years, Beth Ward found her dream career.

During that time, she had more than a dozen different roles with the company, starting as a staff engineer handling materials at the company’s large distribution center in Liberty, Missouri, and working her way up to senior vice president and chief supply chain officer.

Her advice to young engineers looking to find similar career success? Stay curious.

“Something about your childhood and your upbringing made you interested in being an engineer,” she said. “You demonstrated curiosity working puzzles, or played Minecraft, or had a chemistry kit or a camera, or you liked taking things apart and putting them back together.

“There was a curiosity there that I would encourage you to embrace and make sure you don’t lose.”

Ward, who since leaving Hallmark spent two years working as chief operations officer for Smart Warehousing in Overland Park, Kansas, said her work at Hallmark was driven by purpose.

“Meeting consumer needs in the most special moments of their lives,” she said. “That’s a noble purpose. For me, it was all about being a part of that in some way, and that’s what kept me there for more than 25 years.”

Ward was named the 2025 Alumni Fellow for the Carl R. Ice College of Engineering and visited the Manhattan campus in the spring, speaking with students and meeting with college and university leadership as part of the celebration.

Ward graduated in 1993 with a bachelor’s in industrial engineering and said her time as a student at K-State was invaluable in preparation for her impactful career.

“My biggest takeaway is the pride I feel in having an engineering degree from K-State,” she said. “It is a difficult degree to become an engineer. It takes a lot of resilience and grit, and a lot of failure along the way to keep coming back to pursue that degree and attain it.

“Being an engineer is a noble profession and a calling. To be able to solve the world’s problems and contribute to the goodness of humanity and make the world just a little bit better every day that I can practice, for me, that’s what this is all about. I’m incredibly grateful for having that degree.”

While working for Hallmark was her dream career, it wasn’t without its difficult moments. As someone responsible for the supply chain of such a large, influential company, the COVID-19 pandemic presented a huge challenge.

“What COVID did to supply chains created tremendous imbalances that had never occurred in the 40 years of globalization of supply chains,” she said. “We were used to solving problems, that’s what we do all the time. But the magnitude of the problems and the breadth of the problems were pretty remarkable.”

Ward said the best part about returning to campus as Alumni Fellow was the chance to give back to her alma mater.

“Giving back to the university and giving back to the College of Engineering is so important,” she said. “My parents always demonstrated the idea of being generous and giving back when I was growing up.

“For all of the professors and instructors and colleagues that I’ve had throughout K-State through engineering, the chance to be able to give back for all that they did for me is a pretty special feeling.”