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VOLUME 92 • ISSUE 14
Top Dog champion announced BRYN YOUNG News Editor | bjy001@latech.edu
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usiness and engineering students got their moment in the shark tank April 27 at the annual Top Dog New Venture Championship as they pitched business ideas to a panel of judges. The groups of Louisiana Tech students competed to earn up to $8,000 in prize money and a six-month stint in Tech’s incubation space. The four-judge panel was made of business professionals with experience in entrepreneurship who listened to entrepreneurs pitch businesses from ridesharing to medical technology. Debbie Inman, director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Information Technology, planned the event. She said it is not only a great educational opportunity to build student business skills, but also chance for students to start their own business. “It is an educational tool first,” Inman said. “We do have some teams that start up as a result of going through this process. They take their project and start a business. Our last year winners are now a start up. They are in our student in-
Photo by Bryn Young
The competition’s first place winner, Hemocycle, pitched a plan to mass produce a product that recycles blood during surgeries. cubator here on campus.” Inman said this event important because it gives students a chance to gain valuable skills to make them more marketable to busi-
nesses looking to hire in the I-20 area. “Potential employers are very interested in them because it trains students to analytically think,” she said.
“It trains them to support their findings in a public presentation. It forces them to think about market opportunities with different projects. Those are all things employ-
ers want their employees to have, so we are also a job prep tool.” Five checks were given out at the end of the competition to the groups with
the best ideas ranging from $100 to $3,000. This year’s first place winner was the group Hemocycle, who pitched a plan to mass produce a product that can recycle blood during surgery. The group was comprised of Ryan Botts, Joshua Jacobs, Colton Patterson, Steven Pirvu and Caitlin Snell. Botts, an industrial engineering major, said the win was a great prize for the work the group put into the project. “It feels really good,” Botts said. “We were very surprised, but pleasantly surprised. We’re glad our hard work paid off.” Pirvu, a biomedical engineering major, said they wanted to do something helpful that they could accomplish quickly and easily with their skills. “We made phone calls to different hospitals and different people across the globe to find unmet needs in the medical industry,” Pirvu said. “After putting them on the whiteboard, we narrowed them down by what would have the largest impact and help the most people and was also feasible for a one year project. We wanted something we could accomplish using our skill sets as engineers and business students.”
Psychology doctoral program earns national ranking DESTIN SHIMER Staff Reporter | dcs033@latech.edu
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he Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology awarded Louisiana Tech’s psychology doctoral program with the number one ranking in their Applied Development and Opportunities category March 26. These awards are annually bestowed by SIOP on programs that have been particularly influential and successful in the American psychology realm. Donna Thomas, depart-
ment chair of psychology and behavioral sciences, said this ranking is representative of the staff and students who work to ensure prime opportunities for doctoral students to execute their training. “Our program is based on the hard work of our faculty and students to provide these experiences,” Thomas said. “Most of our students are full time and work very hard to ensure the success of our program.” The program’s professional consulting team is
headed by faculty but ran by students. Thomas said because of this, experiences that doctoral students have had opportunity to garner have helped them land jobs at various companies nationwide and globally. “Students from our program have graduated and gone on to take jobs at CenturyLink, Frito Lay, Google, Pepsi Co. and many other notable companies,” Thomas said. “They leave our program with hands-on experience and practical knowledge that other new
graduates just don’t have.” Because the award recognizes the opportunities for psychology grads at Tech, the department hopes future grad students willing to take a more hands-on approach to their studies will apply for the upcoming year. Steven Toaddy, head of psychology, said he expects the ranking will garner a lot of attention, therefore attracting a larger future applicant pool. “I would hope that our program’s recent ranking helps signal to current, pro-
spective and prior students the program’s focus on applied experience,” Toaddy said. “This will help our program to further tweak itself to accentuate its strengths and to acknowledge its shortcomings and to lend us some credibility when we offer guidance to other programs that seek to prepare practitioners for careers in our field.” Toaddy also said the reason he thinks Tech’s received this honor is a direct result of the attitude of the program’s students. “I suspect that what sets
us apart in this ranking is our students’ enthusiasm and willingness to celebrate their opportunity,” Toaddy said. Khristian Shaul, senior psychology major, said the program’s ranking is a very attractive facet of their program and entirely contributes to her decision to apply in the future. “I knew their doctoral program was accredited,” Shaul said. “Now, if I get accepted in the future, I can put on resumes that I attended the No. 1 nationally ranked doctoral program.”