Welcome to the Tour de France Challenge Fundraiser for the Dylan Fitzgerald Carlton Scholarship Fund! I'm riding one of the most difficult stages in the Tour de France this July in an effort to raise $10,000 for the scholarship.
Thanks for taking the time to check out the website. Hopefully, once you've had a chance to look around you'll agree that this scholarship is a great cause and I'll be able to add your name to the donor list.
My name is Ryan Leasher and I'm a Kent State University graduate living in Burbank, California. I'm a computer graphics lighting artist and compositor, and I work in both feature film animation and visual effects (you can find out more here).
I graduated from KSU in 1995 with a Bachelor of General Studies with a Concentration in Computer Animation. That concentration doesn't really exist, but the General Studies program allowed me to create a bunch of independent study classes to focus on computer animation.
Once I'd decided that I wanted to study computer animation, I had a lot of work to do to get things rolling. One of the first things I needed to do was to find a place where I could actually do graphics work. At the time, I didn't have a computer that was capable of doing graphics work so I needed to get access to one that was.
This would have been about the time I discovered the Undergraduate Student Senate Computer Lab tucked into Room 238 of the KSU Student Center. 'Tucked' might be a little generous; the lab was shoehorned into a small room in the far back corner of the Student Center. Without the help of my trusty sherpa guide and his loyal yak I might never have found the lab.
The USS Computer Lab was a unique gem on campus. Although tiny (at that time), it was funded by student activity dollars and the Undergraduate Student Senate (USS) and run by students. The lab was also popular among the art and design students. It was, I think, the rapport between the students running the lab and those using it that made the lab unique.
Donna Carlton and Tom Mahon, the lab's first student manager and a good friend of mine, played a large role in establishing the lab's unique student identity. Donna was (and still is) the faculty advisor for the USS. She was instrumental in getting funding for the lab as well as getting the administration to sign off on the idea.
I started as a student frequenting the lab but eventually ended up as the lab manager, working directly for Donna for several years. While I was manager, Donna helped facilitate a much-needed relocation and growth of the lab. Once the lab was relocated and expanded, we were able to help three times more students than in the old location.
Donna was a great boss and student advisor. With a decade or so of perspective, I think it's because she understood what a lot of other faculty didn't: that we were just a bunch of barely-adults who, for the most part, didn't know what the hell we were doing but that we were still trying our best to do it. She gave us a lot of freedom and support that went far past her job. If that freedom let us screw something up, she'd help us clean up the mess. She understood that we were all away from home and on many occasions she opened hers to students that needed it.
It seems tragedy often befalls those least deserving of it. In the summer of 2002, Donna lost her son Dylan to complications from a congenital heart defect. Dylan was 15.
When Dylan passed away, I was in town teaching a computer graphics workshop for the KSU School of Art. Tom and I attended the funeral together. In the months and years following, Tom and I spoke many times about trying to find a way to memorialize Dylan on campus. The unfortunate truth of the matter, though, was that we didn't yet have the funds to make it happen.
Then in fall 2006 I received an email from Donna about a scholarship. Delta Upsilon, the campus fraternity she has advised for many years, had worked with her to establish the Delta Upsilon Dylan Fitzgerald Scholarship Endowed Scholarship Fund. It was a phenomenal idea.
Once realized, the scholarship will be open to any student meeting certain academic criteria (you can read more about it on the scholarship page). Before a scholarship can actually be realized, there's a critical mass the scholarship funds need to reach to make it self-sustaining. In this case, that amount is $25,000. To help get things rolling, I donated $8,000 last fall to the scholarship fund. The Walt Disney Company matched $2,000 of that, making the total donation $10,000.
This year, though, I need your help to push the scholarship fund closer to its viability goal. As of this writing, the scholarship fund is at $13,683. My goal is to get that over $23,000 by the end of July.
And so I've created the Tour de France Challenge Fundraiser for the Delta Upsilon Dylan Fitzgerald Carlton Endowed Scholarship Fund. Throughout the site you can find out more about the scholarship, the challenge, my training, how to pledge, and what people are saying about the fundraiser.
I hope you'll agree that the scholarship fund is a worthwhile cause. And if you need a little extra incentive, definitely take a look at the challenge and training sections. I'm going to be doing a lot of hard work over the next four months to earn your donation.
Thanks for coming by.
- Ryan Leasher