Nigeria native and LSU fashion design student Sakeenah Ashiru doesn’t intend to become a starving artist when she graduates next year. While she dreams of one day becoming a successful designer of women’s clothing, she knows her desire alone won’t pay the bills. A little business know-how is going to be necessary, too.
As Business Report details in a feature from its new issue, Ashiru began looking for a way to augment her academic résumé to help prepare for the business side of the fashion industry shortly after transferring from Southeastern Louisiana University to LSU in 2014.
“A minor in entrepreneurship sounded like the direction I was going for, because as an artist I want to be able to make my talent profitable,” Ashiru says. “I hoped to get the confidence to start my own business.”
Her timing could not have been better. In late February, the Louisiana Board of Regents approved a new bachelor of science degree in entrepreneurship through the LSU E.J. Ourso College of Business, recognizing the need for a dual degree program that would complement a second, primary degree with an entrepreneurial component. Three new faculty positions were created to support the new entrepreneurship degree program.
On Wednesday, LSU officially announced the E.J. Ourso College of Business will begin offering a bachelor of science in entrepreneurship degree for the first time this fall.
Currently, about 180 students are pursuing a minor in entrepreneurship at LSU. Students who choose to pursue the new major in entrepreneurship will be required to earn a bachelor’s degree in another field at the same time.
College of Business Dean Richard White says this requirement will integrate students’ passions—especially with music and arts—with the life skills needed to survive in the marketplace.
“We’re initially reaching out and working with the engineering, agriculture, art and design, and music and dramatic arts departments because of the interest of their deans,” White says.
Read the full feature, which includes a related story on Emmet and Toni Stephenson, for whom the business college’s Department of Information Systems & Decision Sciences has been renamed the Stephenson Department of Entrepreneurship & Information Systems. The entrepreneurship degree will be offered through this department.
The name change for ISDS was part of a $6 million gift made last year by the Stephensons to be spaced out over 10 years. The couple previously donated $4 million in 2007 to rename and redefine the mission of the college’s entrepreneurship research division, now the Stephenson Entrepreneurship Institute.
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