These free resources make life easier for LSU students
Stock up on the essentials for success at the food pantry and professional clothing closet 🍎📚
College students have to balance classes, homework, extracurriculars, jobs and internships while also trying to care for themselves. For some, that struggle feels never-ending.
LSU’s Campus Life Office and the Olinde Career Center offer resources to help students meet their needs. Two of the most visible are the LSU Food Pantry and the Tailored Tiger Professional Clothing Closet.
According to Jennifer Cristina, manager of operations at Campus Life and the Food Pantry, the pantry served an average of 400 students daily during the 2025-2026 academic year.
Any current LSU student is eligible to grab supplemental groceries from the pantry in the student union once daily, Monday through Friday. Food collected from community partners—Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Walmart, and the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank—as well as direct donations stock the shelves.
Preliminary data from a needs survey revealed that approximately 38 percent of LSU students have low or very low food security, nearly double the national average of 23 percent. Cristina says this helps explain the pantry’s 22 percent increase in visitation since 2024.
“There’s a reason that college students living off of ramen is an old cliché,” Cristina says. “It’s never been easy. I think it’s especially hard right now, and I think us putting these [resources] in place is something I’m so proud of.”
The pantry partners with the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank to receive groceries from around the city. Donations from campus organizations and local businesses also help, but Cristina says the SEC Food Fight competition is the best way for the community to support them.
Every spring, schools in the Southeastern Conference compete to collect the most money and donations for their food pantries. Last year, LSU raised over $10,000 and ranked third in the contest. Cristina says she wants to make this year’s competition the biggest yet and bring home first place.
“We saw how much people got behind the Jell-O shot challenge, and I want to transfer some of that competition to the food fight when we compete against the other schools,” Cristina says.
Another resource helping students succeed is the Tailored Tiger Professional Clothing Closet, which provides LSU students with professional attire. Last year, 596 students shopped there.
Megan Elliott-Smith, Manager of Tailored Tiger and Operations Manager at the LSU Olinde Career Center, says that professional clothing often feels daunting to students and young professionals.
Staff at Tailored Tiger assist visitors in choosing the right attire for their needs. They even fit suits and tailor minor fixes. All LSU students can pick out four clothing items per semester. The closet has dresses, blouses, trousers, blazers and suit jackets. Items come in a variety of sizes and can fit a student’s needs, whether they have an internship, a job interview, a presentation or a meeting to attend.
This service aligns with the career center’s broader mission to prepare students to be career-ready upon graduation. In addition to the closet, the center also offers free headshot sessions and an internship fund.
“Our goal is to try and just remove barriers from students as much as we can when it comes to their career journey and getting to where they want to be career-wise, and clothing is something so simple to think about, but something that can be really impactful,” Elliot-Smith says.
Both the food pantry and the professional closet address specific, very important needs. Workers at the Career Center and the Campus Life Office recognize that students often struggle in several different ways, and that some need more support than others. This is why the two departments collaborate to support students holistically.
Cristina says working in the Campus Life Office has opened her eyes to challenges that she was unaware of in college. She says she is proud to work in this department, where everyone’s goal is to improve the lives of all LSU students.
“Everyone is here for the student, and we realize the student is more than what they show up as in the classroom,” Cristina says. “It’s more than their tuition coming in. We see them as people. We’ve all been there; we know the different kinds of struggles that a student can have.”
