When Richard D. Reidy (SMG'82) began exploring options for college, he says, he "didn't expect to go to a school like Boston University. My father was a firefighter with four kids, so affording the tuition at BU was unthinkable."

	Richard D. Reidy (SMG'82). Photo by Fred Sway

Yet thanks to scholarships and other financial aid, Reidy did attend BU. He earned his bachelor's degree in 1982 and has never forgotten what made it possible. Whenever students from Telefund called, he says, "I gave what I could afford. It started with about $50, and then got up to $500." Last year, Reidy decided to support BU in an even more significant way, and he and his wife, Minda (SMG'82, GSM'84), established an endowed scholarship with a gift of $50,000. With his father's profession, the tragedy of September 11, and the ongoing war on terror in mind, they specified that the Reidy Family Scholarship benefit the sons and daughters of fire, police, and military personnel.

The scholarship is designed for SMG and CAS students concentrating in management information systems or in computer science. Reidy, whose SMG degree concentration was management information systems, recognizes the importance of computer technology in the education of today's students. He cites an SMG database management course as the most important he has ever taken, "at any school, anywhere, anytime. I think a technical curriculum in the School of Management is crucial since computer technology, business applications, and information assets are fundamental to most businesses today. Not to mention," he adds, "I met Minda in this course."

Reidy's database professor helped him land his first job building database system software on a thirty-two-bit computer system then being developed at Computervision. While there, he continued taking computer science courses at BU's Metropolitan College and Minda worked toward her M.S./M.I.S. degree, which allowed her to enter the software business as well. "The technical curriculum within SMG, GSM, and MET were major catalysts for both me and Minda in getting our start in the software business," he says.

In 1985, Reidy joined a small start-up company, Progress Software Corporation, as one of the early developers of its relational database product, software that eases and speeds computer search, retrieval, and storage of business data. Over the years, Reidy has held several positions at the company and is now senior vice president of product and corporate development. Today, Progress, now a $300 million, publicly traded company in Bedford, Massachusetts, supplies technologies for the development, deployment, integration, and management of business applications.