Kelly Dolak (July 18)

Kelly was my college advisor. For as long as I knew her she was working on a documentary about Afghanistan. She was always the first to support a creative idea or anything outside of the box. She was responsible for helping Grace and I create our sketch comedy show, Baked Goods.

We took an idea development class with Kelly to form our idea. After that, we wanted to go into full production. Kelly actually transformed her class "TV for New Media" into a production class for our show. We added the rest of our cast to the class; Brian, Rich and Michelle. Anybody else that signed up basically became part of our production team. While Grace and I wrote most of the early sketches, the cast members all eventually joined the creative process. We even ended up doing most of the editing. Despite other class members sometimes complaining about us doing all of the work, Kelly seemed content to let us pretty much do whatever we wanted.

While the final products were sometimes less than desirable, we learned a ton about production, writing, editing and working with others, especially under awful time constraints.

Kelly also allowed for me to do my ridiculously unorthodox internship, chronicled here weeks ago. She never gave me a hard time about not following all the rules and was content with everything I talked to her about. I always felt like I could be completely honest with Kelly and she never steered me wrong.

Kelly was really just another crazy creative type who actually completely understood me. For all of her absentmindedness and quirkiness, she was one of the most influential people in my college years simply because she let me do things my way.