Baton Rouge Fashion Council to host Spring Style Brunch, page 4 Star athletes’ social media fame promotes popularity, page 5 lsunow.com/daily
THURSDAY, APRIL 14, 2016
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@lsureveille
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Volume 121 · No. 57
LSU PLANTING THE SEED Foundation ADMINISTRATION
to revamp fundraising
Week-long event introduces children to variety of agricultural fields
BY CAITIE BURKES @caitie1221
BY TIA BANERJEE @tiabanerjee_
photos by HASKELL WHITTINGTON / The Daily Reveille
F
rom looking at different types of crops and digging up worms to petting baby alligators, piglets and calves, the LSU AgCenter’s AgMagic gives participants a taste of all that the field of agriculture has to offer. AgMagic takes tour groups through seven portals: Louisiana 4-H, “World of Wonder,” “Farming the Waters,” “Plant Products,” “Bugs Rule!,” “Animals Produce For You” and “Farm Gate to Dinner Plate.” These seven portals show event-goers the different aspects of the wide field of agriculture, from forestry, wildlife and bugs to working with livestock and growing fresh produce. “The whole thing is very exciting to them, and I think they realize that the agriculture is very broad,” Frances Gould, AgMagic coordinator and
AgCenter communications and public relations director, said. “It’s not just cotton and rice and sugarcane. [Agriculture] affects every part of their life.” Every year, AgMagic has 8,00010,000 visitors. The week-long event hosts school students for five days and then is open to the public for two days. School children, ranging from preschoolers to teens in junior high, visit AgMagic with their school groups. The groups come mostly from a nineparish perimeter around Baton Rouge, but some groups come from as far as St. Charles Parish and Lafayette, Gould said. Animal sciences assistant professor Shannon Cruzen said seeing the livestock often makes the children excited, sometimes too excited, but
serves as a good learning experience. “A lot of the kids here, they’re urban kids only. They’ve never been exposed to any of this, so realizing where their food comes from is really important,” Cruzen said. Ashley Boyle, a first grade teacher at Tanglewood Elementary School, said the event is often memorable for the children. “They hear about cows and goats and crawfish and dirt, but they often don’t get to see it,” Boyle said. “I mean them walking into the room and seeing the huge cow, it’s like a huge impact. They’re definitely going to remember it.”
see AGMAGIC, page 2
Louisiana’s then-secretary of economic development Stephen Moret rummaged for an explanation as to why the University of Alabama ranked 49 spots higher than LSU on a U.S. News and World Report list of best colleges to attend. Despite his perception of LSU as an academically stronger institution, Moret said the “single biggest differentiator” in rankings was the alumni giving rate, in which LSU ranks last in the SEC. With a three-year alumni giving rate average of 6 percent, Moret said the University has plenty of room to grow. As Moret wraps up a “comprehensive blueprint” detailing the University’s economic development future within the next two months, he plans to expand philanthropic support throughout the flagship campus. In the state’s constrained fiscal environment, he said it has become more important to some that colleges to be free than high-quality. “We have to find ways to be able to close the gap and create
see FUNDRAISING, page 2 BUSINESS
Venture Challenge awards $25,000 to student entrepreneurs BY KATIE GAGLIANO @katie_gagliano The fifth annual LSU Student Incubator Venture Challenge ended Wednesday with several large checks, totaling $25,000, awarded to support burgeoning student businesses. Twenty-three student incubator businesses entered this year’s competition, the most in the event’s history, said Student Incubator manager Kenny Anderson. This year’s four finalists — Ambici, Tonal Innovation, Louisiana Decoy Company and Lagniappe Onshore — pitched their business plans to a panel of four judges in a live competition. Anderson said the challenge developed from a need to
provide students with easy access to capital. Students often have difficulty acquiring capital to support their businesses because they do not have the collateral necessary to take out loans, he said. Mock pitch events are common practice among business incubators across the country, and monetizing the event was a great way to incentivize students to create business plans, he said. “We wanted it to be a little more fun, and we wanted to light a fire under them,” Anderson said. Ambici took home the first place prize of $8,500. Brothers Reed and Riley Stephens, a mechanical engineering sophomore and Mandeville High School
senior respectively, created their wooden watch company after growing up surrounded by their father and grandfather’s carpentry work. “We thought it was only right to blend our passion for wood and love for watches together,” Reed said. The brothers prepared for the competition for two weeks, practicing their speech to a stuffed sweatshirt with a tissue box head as a stand-in for the live judges. Despite the extensive practice, the win was still a shock, Reed said. “I was very surprised,” Reed said. “I thought Tonal [Innovation] was going to take it because their presentation was phenomenal. Someone actually
laughed at me because when they said it my mouth actually dropped.” Tonal Innovation’s Daniel Wendt, a finance senior and Tiger Band drum major, and business management senior Garrett Kessling, the band’s saxophone section leader, took home the second place prize of $6,250. The company’s eFlip device will allow musicians to connect their smartphone or tablet to their instrument using a lyre, saving the musician the time and hassle spent fumbling with traditional music flip books, Wendt and Kessling said. Third place winner Aaron Koenck, a history and political
see VENTURE, page 2
GRETA JINES / The Daily Reveille
History and political science senior Aaron Koenck pitches his business, Louisiana Decoy Company, Wednesday, as part of the LSU Student Incubator’s Venture Challenge at the Lod Cook Alumni Center.