Connecting the Past, Present, and Future

By Charles McKenzie, May 22, 2023

Shevori Gene ’23 reunites with his mother, and a young man reunites with IC.

Shevori Gene ’23, his mother Julieth Ledgly (far right) and two of his aunts.

(Photo by Charles McKenzie)

Julieth Ledgly crossed the Atlantic pulled by golden arches on a distant horizon and pushed by everything she had ever loved. For three heartbreaking years toiling away in a Syracuse McDonald’s, she longed to gaze upon her home island of Jamaica, her culture and her 4-year-old son, Shevori Gene, a boy she could see only in memories and hear only as a faint, fleeting voice on the telephone.

“It was mostly just, ‘Hi, Mom. I love you. Bye!” Shevori Gene remembers. “I was more interested in getting back out into the yard and playing with my cousins.”

Those calls were all she needed though to keep working, sending money back to Jamaica and saving so she could bring Shevori and his brother to the U.S. After all of that, all she wanted in return from him was a single act: for him to get a college degree.

“Soooo...” he says, drawing out the “o” to delay what would have to come next, “when I decided not to return to Ithaca College for fall 2020 semester, I couldn’t even tell her for a month,” he said. What was almost worse was telling her why. He worried she would think he was throwing his academic career away for the equivalent of magic beans. It wasn’t though. It was crypto.

Leaving School

What unfolded over the coming months would be a series of hurdles along his path of self-discovery. The only constants left in his life were his mother’s love, his entrepreneurial drive and his guilt for allowing himself to be pulled away by a desire to do the thing...not just to study it.

“Him leaving school was a nightmare for me. I was so worried about him,” she said of the boy she called her Christmas gift (he was born on December 25).

Gene credits IC's Martin Luther King Jr. Scholar and Collegiate Science & Technology Entry Programs with giving him the support he needed to return to school. (Photo by Dave Burbank '82)

In fact, for one Christmas/birthday, Gene’s waitress mother had struggled through the entire holiday season to surprise him with a coveted iPod that he lost just days later.

He told himself then he would never again disappoint her like that, and yet here he was. How could he tell a woman who worked so tirelessly at multiple jobs that he was quitting the only job that she had ever wanted for him?

If the thrill of money and experience pulled him away from IC, several things called him back. The first was a second family, a community of underrepresented students and administrators who supported him in profound ways.

“Without them, there is maybe a 50/50 chance I don’t graduate tomorrow,” the Martin Luther King Jr. Scholar said just ahead of his commencement. He thanked that program and IC’s Collegiate Science & Technology Entry Program (CSTEP). “If I didn’t have those two support systems, my life would have really been up in the air. I could have been in a situation where I had to tell my mom, ‘Hey, I'm so sorry. I know it’s not what you ever wanted to hear, but I just can’t do it. I’m not going to be finishing school.’”

Instead, one week after Mother’s Day, one year after he was initially scheduled to graduate, and 20 years after his mother had left him with aunts in Jamaica, he has become the first in his family to earn his college degree. His mother, with whom he reunited at 7 years old, and two of his aunts were in attendance along with his brother, father and sister-in-law.

The Grind

His large, hard-working Jamaican family had taught him to hustle in life, and his father and step-father were both entrepreneurs. It was both a proud inheritance and a brief curse, instilling in him an eager drive to make money to support his family. Although he was a Television and Digital Media Production major, he devoted his first four semesters to taking almost every investing course he could find, whether it was at IC or on YouTube.

Once the COVID-19 pandemic hit, he struggled in virtual classes, and before enduring another floundering semester via Zoom, he literally took stock: the world of cryptocurrencies and other investing called to him, and his trading success was far outpacing his recent academic success.

In addition to his mother and aunts, Gene's father (left) and brother attended his commencement ceremony on May 21.

(Photo by Dave Burbank '82)

“I was definitely telling myself this was like an internship, and I could continue to capitalize on this opportunity while continuing to grow mentally. My ultimate goal was to get to a point where I was so extremely financially stable that I could go to my mom and be like, ‘I'm not going to go to college anymore, but we’re going to be okay in life.’ I had that fantasy at times.”

He remembered one night when he and a team turned a whopping 30 percent profit in just four hours. The initial investment was low, so the return was minimal, but what if he’d had more to invest? His mind raced, and not back to IC.

Back to Campus

At least, not until he discovered a way to scratch another itch at college. He found an Entrepreneurship and Innovation minor that allowed he and a classmate to enter—and win—pitch competitions, eventually making their way to Rev Ithaca, an incubator where he honed a Shea butter startup idea and found funding. His partner eventually stepped away, leaving Gene the “Chief Everything Officer.”

Gene had been picturing giving his mother a long hug once he graduated college, and the moment didn't disappoint. (Photo by Dave Burbank '82)

Entrepreneurship instructor Edward Catto called Gene “a top-notch student. He’s extremely charming but also very focused. He has great insights and can present them to the world in a very compelling way. Working with him makes us all look good.”

Catto said while Gene is extremely hardworking, he makes it look effortless at times.

“I've always had that hustle mentality,” Gene said, “and I really enjoy learning, but before that minor, it felt like higher education was not for me. Those entrepreneurship courses kind of saved me. I was really enjoying getting to do what I wanted to do. It was still through school, but I was getting to have the real-world experiences of working on business ideas as opposed to other more traditional academic work.”

And now as it all comes to a close, he gets tears in his eyes thinking about his mother and how he can possibly thank her.

“I think I’m just going to let it all flow. I know that I've made this much more difficult for her than it should have been. I’m not a caged bird. I hated being a burden, and now the next chapter of our story is to live my life in a way to help her retire. I’m going to get there. I’m picturing giving a long embrace, and saying, ‘Mama, Mama, Mama, I did it! Thank you for everything. Nothing was unseen,’ you know. I just want to express all of that to her tomorrow and then to get back to work.”

A family tradition decades in the making.