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In Focus Summer Commencement –
Belle Wheelan, president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, delivered the keynote address at summer commencement. Photo by Jim Zietz
Alumni staffers BJ Bellow, left, director of chapters, and Tracy Jones, assistant vice president, welcome newly commissioned U.S. Army 2nd Lt. Andrew Luke Hargroder to Tiger Nation. Photo by Brandli Roberts
Belle Wheelan, president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, delivered the keynote address at LSU’s 287th commencement ceremony on Aug. 7, during which 672 students received degrees. Of the graduates, 332 earned bachelor’s degrees, 212 earned master’s degrees, six received a certificate of education specialist, seven received post-bachelorette certificates, and 115 received doctoral degrees. The August 2015 graduating class represented fortyone Louisiana parishes, thirty-two states, and thirty-four foreign countries. Men made up 51.19 percent of the graduates, and women made up 48.81 percent. The oldest graduate was sixty-four, and the two youngest graduates were twenty.
Former Chancellor Sean O’Keefe and Adam Grashoff.
Leadership Award – LSU senior Adam Grashoff, Mandeville, La., received the inaugural Sean O’Keefe Leadership Award during the Katrina & Rita: A Decade of Research & Response Symposium on Aug. 28. Former Chancellor O’Keefe was on hand for the event and presented the $10,000 cash award to Grashoff, an accounting major planning to graduate in May 2016. The award – created by LSU donors who recognized O’Keefe’s leadership during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – recognizes and rewards an outstanding undergraduate student leader who has demonstrated exceptional leadership in the past and possesses the character, capability, vision, and motivation to be a leader in the future. O’Keefe is a longtime public administrator, national security expert, and aerospace industry executive who has served in several top leadership positions in government, higher education, and industry. He led LSU during its response to Hurricane Katrina in August and September 2005, when the campus was transformed into what has been called “the largest acute-care field hospital established in a contingency in the nation’s history.” Photo by Eddy Perez
36 LSU Alumni Magazine | Winter 2015