UI Student Entrepreneurs Featured

In an article about how students in universities are learning entrepreneurship, two UNIVERSITY OF IOWA students are featured. At 21, Diana Reed has already reached the pinnacle of one career. A senior at the University of Iowa, she is the Hawkeye Golden Girl, one of the top twirlers in the Big Ten. Every Saturday during football season, she strutted down the 50-yard line in sequins and Spandex, flinging her baton into the sky before a stadium jammed with tens of thousands of howling football fans.

Besides four hours of baton practice a day, Reed runs Diana's Golden Twirlers, a for-profit school she started freshman year. One of her squads recently won the state twirling championship. A dual major in dance and business, Reed credits the four classes on entrepreneurship that she has taken at Iowa.

"I learned how to think about twirling as a market, not just a sport," she says. "My career as a competitive twirler may be coming to an end, but I can see there's almost unlimited potential in the twirling market."

Diana Reed has caught an entrepreneurial fever that is sweeping the nation's campuses, as students jam into classes to learn how to launch, finance, and run their own companies.

Also featured is Megan Wettach, a 22-year-old junior and fashion major at the University of Iowa. In high school she opened a store to sell prom dresses in her hometown of Mount Pleasant, Iowa. Last semester, after taking a class in entrepreneurship, she began designing her own gowns, secured a $150,000 line of credit with a bank in Des Moines, signed a contract with an apparel maker in China, and negotiated a deal to sell her dresses in Nordstrom."My professors opened my eyes to the idea that I can be bigger than a little dress store in Iowa," Wettach says. "I can be a global force in fashion."

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