Roll Wave!

Last night was one of those nights that reminds me of how lucky I am to work for such a great school. It all started a few weeks ago when my coworker Kasey got an e-mail from Coach Ronnie Hamilton, the assistant coach of our men's basketball team here at Tulane. Ronnie and the team were having a cool program that invited members from Tulane's faculty and staff to attend a VIP game day experience with the team. Naturally, Kasey and I, both huge Tulane and New Orleans sports fans, immediately took him up on his offer.

Yesterday's game against the Conference rival SMU Mustangs from Dallas was our big day, but we had no idea how big it would be for us. Ronnie and his group had an awesome day of events planned out for us, and Kasey and I totally felt like VIP from start to finish. It stated with a team dinner in our university center at 3:00. We had a chance to eat a great pre-game dinner of pork chops, chicken breast, mashed potatoes, etc., I think the players each ate three times what I did, but hey, it was a big game. The team was awesome- so welcoming, accommodating and truly happy to have Kasey and I there. We got to meet head coach Ed Conroy, who is absolutely a class act. He is a great leader for this team, and the guys really seem to have a great amount of adoration and respect for him. The team's got a great deal of camaraderie as well, which was awesome to see. They come from everywhere: Florida, Georgia, South Africa, Germany, etc... you get the idea.

Lunch with the team. I felt short. 

Gametime was 7:00, but we arrived at 6:15 for the locker room pre-game chat from the coach. Conroy talked about our skills and strategy for beating the Mustangs and had a good 20 minutes of chalk talk with the team, the coaches, and Kasey and me. I was going to chime in with my tips for outlet passes and offensive rebounds, but figured I would leave it to coach to handle the chat.

After the pre-game chat with the players, Coach Conroy and Kasey and I headed up to the Coach's Corner where Coach spent some time giving a rundown of the game and the lineup with our season ticket holders and members of the Tulane Athletics Fund and our athletic donors. Coach was cordial with all the fans and donors and took time to answer all of their questions and even accept their advice for how tonight game should pan out.

Then it was back to the locker room for the team to be announced and take the court. I got to get some daps from each of the players, including my favorite Jordan Callahan. I think that I really brought them some luck with my fist. At least so I like to think.

Players giving daps to me (and vice-versa)

The game was awesome. We got off to a rough start in the first half, but really killed it in the second. Tulane put up 63 points in the second half to come back from behind to beat SMU 80-74, bringing us to 14-6 overall and 2-4 in the CUSA. Our freshman Ricky Tarrant was en fuego, posting a 33-point game, which marked the most points for a freshman to score for the Green Wave in any game. My man Jordan Callahan had 16 points and five assists. The student section was on fire, and the whole ambiance at Fogelman last night was incredible.

When the game was over we got to head back to the locker room to hear Conroy give some great breakdowns of the game and let his team know how proud of them he was. He even told Kasey and I, (who are now evidently on a first name basis with him) that it was us who brought the team good luck tonight. See? My daps helped.

What an awesome night for me, for Tulane basketball and for the school as a whole. I was totally impressed with  how welcoming Coach and his staff and team were, they made us feel welcome and truly a part of the team for a night. The players where awesome- friendly, funny, and all around great guys to be around. At the end of the night, we snapped a picture with Jordan, said goodbye to Ronnie and the rest of the coaching staff and players, and then headed home, full of Green Wave pride. Roll Wave indeed!

Inside the locker room

Kasey in the locker room, checking out past NBA Green Wave players

What game would be complete without a performance from Shockwave, Tulane's student dance team. 

Time out. See the guy in the blue shirt and tie? Well that is Zach Schreiber,  a junior at Tulane from New York. He is our official team  manager; he manages the day-to-day operations of the team and also travels to all of our away games (even last month when we played number 1 Syracuse!) He's planning on going into sports management when he graduates.

Piling on the points in the second half. 

Final Score. Roll Wave! 

We win! 

Post game with Coach Conroy in the locker room.

Our man Jordan Callahan! He's going to be on that NBA list someday. 

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New Orleans- A City for Entrepreneurs

This past weekend, I spent some time at the Idea Village in downtown New Orleans. I was asked to help out with a group of Teach for America corps members who have an idea to create a program that will help middle school students begin the "college process" earlier. The Idea Village is an incredible organization here that helps entrepreneurs like them get their ideas off the ground. They offer support, advice and backing for any kind of concept that entrepreneurs come up with; their slogan is "Trust Your Crazy Ideas!". White boards make up the walls of the rooms in the Idea Village and Kevin Wilkins, one of the Idea Village's many entrepreneurs-in-residence (and subsequently also a Tulane professor!) was there volunteering his time to help us bounce our crazy ideas all over those walls.

And if there is one city at the center of new (and crazy) ideas right now, it's New Orleans. In fact, over the past six years, New Orleans has quickly grown into one of the leading cities for entrepreneurs anywhere in America. Tulane and our students get actively involved in this as well; our business school's Levy-Rosenblum Institute for Entrepreneurship annually puts on the "THINK BIG" Youth Entrepreneurship Networking Event, and that is just one of the many programs and events that are available for Tulane's future entrepreneurs on campus. The Levy-Rosenblum institute is a great resource for our students to get their great ideas off the ground through resources, mentoring, community service, grants and internships. In fact, for me as a former student at the Freeman School, I can honestly say that the entrepreneurship courses I took here were some of the best classes I took in college. Our Management undergraduate major (which was my major!) has a great entrepreneurship track that you can choose to take advantage of all of these resources.

So many start ups!
(Source: siliconbayounews.com)

But its not just on campus that this passion for entrepreneurship has been ignited. The city of New Orleans has been a hotbed for this kind of activity since we began this huge "Brain Gain" that has occurred following Hurricane Katrina. According to a recent Brookings Institute report, entrepreneurial activity here in New Olrenas is 40% above the national average. According to this article in Forbes, much of the reason behind this is that this city became a start up city very rapidly with all of the changes and growth we experienced in our rebuilding. Its great spots like the Idea Village that are supporting this, with over 1,100 entrepreneurs supported since they were founded.

And people are starting to take notice. The Wall Street Journal named New Orleans the 2011 Most Improved City for Business. That is huge news for us! After that, the good news just kept coming. NOLAbound capitalized on this great wave of new ideas and business by creating a platform for national entrepreneurs and start ups to bring their ideas and plans to New Orleans. The project will bring 25 soon-to-be-named winning individuals to New Orleans for a week long explosion of entrepreneurial events. Looking through the applicants, I saw countless  Tulane alumni, including my fraternity brother Pat who has created an ESPN type of network for sports that ESPN does not cover. You can read more about NOLAbound here and here.

I could post article after article all about New Orleans and its great start up and entrepreneur boom, but I will spare you. (okay, fine, just this one more from NPR. It's great!) This start up boom and fostering environment for entrepreneurs is great for Tulane and our students. It means that many more internship opportunities, that many more resources, and that many more jobs available for you once you graduate. My fraternity brothers Joe and Brendan are taking advantage of it right now too, they are some of the best young entrepreneurs that this city fosters; their company ChapterSpot was accepted into the Idea Village's accelerator program. You can read all about their start up here. With so many Tulane students taking advantage of all the resources that New Orleans currently offers, it's great to see so many incredible success stories.

My trip to the Idea Village was such a great peek into this bustling industry here in New Orleans. Trust me, the resources are endless; check out 25 great resources for entrepreneurs in NOLA. Then, come down for and check out Tulane and New Orleans and start planning the ways that you will trust YOUR crazy ideas!

My buddies, and Tulane alumni, 
Joe and Brendan who started ChapterSpot

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MEMORY'S TRICKS

Memory plays strange tricks on us. There are not only (A) the losses of things we want to remember, but also (B) the things it annoyingly won’t let us forget. And further (C), things we puzzlingly don’t know why we remember. They neither bother nor delight us, only make us wonder why these rather than something else.

For reasons that elude me, I recently thought of the Swedish film and stage director, the late Johan Bergenstrahle, whose one superb film not even many Swedes have seen, but whose stage work at Stockholm’s City Theater is remembered and well thought of. One evening in a Stockholm café, he voiced his gnawing concern to me. How to deal with the fact that his still young and beautiful girlfriend’s ass, hitherto firm and smooth, was starting to develop a kind of moiré effect of unsightly ripples?

I don’t recall what sort of solace I could offer him, nor how he responded. But sometime later, I received an unexpected letter from him in his large, imposing handwriting, thanking me for what I had said, and telling me it had helped him. Now, however, I cannot for the life of me recall what it was; all I am sure of is that it wasn’t naming some miraculous ointment or other, but some psychological adjustment. Still, an A case.

But now for a B. The protagonist of a play by Jean Anouilh is tormented by memories of cruelties he inflicted as a youth on various animals. Alas, I too in my boyhood was given an air gun with which I shot poor innocent sparrows without even the excuse of food for myself or fodder for some pets. I still evince intermittent pangs of conscience, and, of course, there is no possible expiation.

Even unarmed, I must have offended some human beings, to whom a belated apology might be possible. Here, however, memory fails me. But I can recall and offer specimens of type C.

My father was fond of philosophy and when the respected philosopher Arthur Liebert, fleeing the Nazis, landed impecuniously in Belgrade, my parents would frequently have him over for dinner. I remember his philosophical head (bald on top and lots of snow-white fringe), but only one inconsequential thing he said. We took him to see “Broadway Melody of 1940,” whose much-touted star, Eleanor Powell, does not appear till the second or third reel. “Wann kommt die Povel?” inquired, stentorously mispronouncing, the impatient philosopher.

There are stranger Cs, however. My father was a wise as well as witty man, yet I remember clearly only one thing he said. My parents and I were in Paris, returning to our hotel after a show, when we saw a sign reading “Repas” (meals) over a closed restaurant door. Said my father in Hungarian, “Even this root vegetable man has shut shop by now.” Repas, with an acute accent on both vowels, would, if such a word existed, mean root vegetable dealer or man. Somehow, the preposterousness of that reading and pronunciation had all three of us burst out laughing. Why remember this of all things?

Of my mother, I recall only, as she was washing me in my childhood behind my ears, referring to “the little bench behind your ears.” Calling it a little bench is rather strange, but surely not memorable. One other remark of hers, to my wife, and relayed to me by her, was, “Who is that old woman looking at me from the mirror?” Seems very apt to me these late days.

The one utterance of my own I recall from my infancy is, walking in the park with my grandmother and seeing a nest of ants, “What a multitude of beetles!” To be sure, “Menge” in German was less resonant than the English “multitude.” Though entomologically incorrect, it made an impression on grandmotherly ears, and was duly reported as proof of my linguistic prowess.

Actions are more memorable than words, and I do remember a few from my boyhood. For instance, on a holiday at an Italian seaside watering place, there was a girl of maybe twelve, like me, who tried fishing in the bay with a butterfly net. It got away from her and was starting to float away to sea. My parents were away, and I, not yet a secure swimmer, chivalrously waded right in fully clothed, unconcerned with how deep and dangerous the water might be just there. Luckily, I retrieved the net. A friendly lady, horrified, carried me off to her room and gave me a rubdown and something dry to wear. I wonder now, is this memory a B or a C?

Oddly enough, an insignificant event from my ripe years often haunts me in B fashion. At a public spelling bee, Phoebe, a co-worker at New York magazine, wanted to join in, but only if I would too.  An early word was “cartilage.” I spelled it “cartilege.” This faux pas was actually written up in some British newspaper to my eternal shame.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could teach our memory to remember only pleasant things, and skip the indifferent or bad ones?  Of course, the latter may function as useful warnings against recidivism. But when would I ever again have to spell “cartilage” in public?

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Guest Blog: Service goes with Tulane, like Red Beans goes with Rice!

Happy New Year gang! Time for another guest blog. This time, you're hearing from one of my favorite students, Lea Bogner, the Jeff-proclaimed Ms. Tulane Community Service 2012. Take it away Lea...

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Here I am as the Easter Bunny for an
Egg Hunt in the Desire Neighborhood.  

Hi everyone! My name is Lea Bogner and I am a senior at Tulane, majoring in International Relations and International Development. I'm also the Chair of the Community Action Council of Tulane University Students (CACTUS) and a Community Service Scholar. Since the deadline for the Community Service Scholarship is rapidly approaching, I decided to hijack Jeff's blog to tell you all about service at Tulane.

When you apply for the Community Service Scholarship, you're not only applying for more scholarship, but to become a member of the Scholars community. The Scholars are a tight knit community that works hard to go above and beyond our 50 service hour commitment per semester and create new, innovative service programs across New Orleans. We have retreats, and "families" that we meet with throughout the year to have dinner, work on programming and just have some fun!

All of our Scholars, and hundreds of other Tulane students, are members of CACTUS. CACTUS is the umbrella organization for over 30 service organizations on campus. We have tutoring groups, mentoring programs, groups that visit nursing homes, groups that run gardens in the Lower Ninth Ward, groups that travel to Honduras, Nicaragua, South Africa... and groups that do even more! You can see a list and descriptions of all of our organizations here and here.

Our programs work daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. The Tulane University Community Advancement Network (TUCAN) goes to the NFL YET center everyday to tutor and mentor. Science Club spends every Friday doing Science Experiments at Ben Franklin Elementary while the Athletic Program coaches at a local park.

Senior, Mississippi native and Political Science major, Marshall Cox plays with students  as part of the Athletic Program.

During the year, CACTUS brings campus organizations and Service-Learning classes together to host a "carnival" for 300 local kids on campus.  Organizations like Undergraduate Student Government, the Green Wave Ambassadors (our tour guides!) the Tulane Emergency Medical Services and even the Board Games Club set up booths for students to play games and make crafts. This year's Halloween Day was terrifyingly successful with organizations, TIDES classes, and dorms participating. The Paterson House hosted trick or treaters with LOTS of candy and decorated hallways.

Freshman, Vermont Native, and tour guide, John Crowley poses with some  2nd graders from  Success Prep. John's Leadership TIDES class had a "potion making table". The course's instructor, Dean MacLaren, "borrowed" liquid nitrogen to be added to Kool Aid to make a spooky treat!

Here I am after the Mummy wrap and trick or treating with Jamie from Success Prep!

Twice a year we have two HUGE service events: Outreach Tulane and the Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service. Outreach Tulane hosts over 1000 Tulane students at 30 sites across the city and kicks off our semester of service work, educating student and faculty volunteers about the different New Orleans neighborhoods. It is a totally student run event: we work with the organizations to develop the projects, we do the fundraising and we even do the art work for the t-shirts! It's a huge part of the Tulane expereince and a great way for freshmen to learn about the city. As I quoted from the movie "Mean Girls" to this freshmen class during my speech at New Student Welcome, "it's social suicide if you don't do Outreach".

Here I am with one of the 4 pallets of supplies necessary for Outreach!

Here is a group working with Youth Rebuilding New Orleans. YRNO's executive board member is a Tulane Alumn. Class of 2011! And who is the guy giving me bunny ears in this picture? Just Dean MacLaren-- Dean of the Undergraduate College. Even our administrators do service!

The MLK Day of Service is our service day at the beginning of spring semester. It has us teaming up with Loyola, Xavier and Dillard, "making a day off, a day on". It's a great way to make new friends at the other universities.

As a future Tulane student, you'll learn that there is no place quite like the Big Easy. We work to honor, give back and learn about our great city with every service project that we do. It's not about getting a project done and moving on-- it's about learning about New Orleans' rich culture and history and creating real lasting relationships with the people and communities we work with.

As our CACTUS motto goes, "We do it for our school. We do it for our community. We do it for the love of New Orleans".


Good luck on your applications and thanks for reading!

Jermyra and I as part of the tutoring program through CACTUS'
Tulane University Community Advancement Network (TUCAN)

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