Pausch has been featured on a wide variety of national television programs for giving what has been termed “The Last Lecture,” an annual feature at Carnegie Mellon and other universities where retiring professors often give their “final” lectures to fellow staff and students, imparting the most invaluable pieces of wisdom they’ve learned and the most memorable experiences they’ve enjoyed along the way. For Pausch, who was diagnosed in 2006 with pancreatic cancer and underwent several surgeries only to learn in August that he had only three to six months of good health left before he would enter the final terminal stage of his illness, the “last lecture” has turned out to be much more than anything anyone anticipated.
He has been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America, and ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson, where he was named “Person of the Week.” But long before these public accolades, Pausch had established himself as one of academia’s most accomplished computer science experts and engineering professors.
After receiving his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brown University, he went on to Carnegie Mellon University, where he completed his doctorate, also in computer science. He also co-founded a number of professional organizations, including Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, and has been named a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow.
From 1988 to 1997 he taught in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, later working for Walt Disney Imagineering and Electronic Arts and consulting with Google on user-interface design. In addition to being the founder of the Alice software project (an open-source educational programming language and computer-animation design tool), Pausch has co-authored or authored five books and more than 70 articles.
As the 46-year-old father of three young children (aged one, three, and five) who will sadly never know their father beyond the early years of their lives, Pausch has placed most of the emphasis in his lecture on the value and meaning of his childhood dreams, which included playing professional football, writing a World Book Encyclopedia entry, walking in zero gravity, and designing rides at Disney World. Indeed, the title of Pausch’s last lecture is “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” The amazing thing is that most of these dreams have been realized by Pausch, who holds the distinction of having designed Disney’s breakthrough 3-D Aladdin ride and who was invited to play with the Pittsburgh Steelers in October.
Pausch also had the unusual goal of winning as many stuffed animals at amusement parks as possible, witnessed in the mid-lecture unveiling of all the oversized stuffed animals he’s won over the years. His point: he doesn’t need them anymore, but the fact that he accomplished what he set out to do — along with the other, loftier ambitions — is reason enough to let the world (and his children) know that he did in fact reach his objective.
In his lecture Pausch highlights the following as the most important things he’s learned professionally and personally from both his family and the workplace:
- When you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore, that means they gave up.
- Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
- People will show you their good side if you give them time.
Gabriel Robins, a professor of computer science at the University of Virginia’s Engineering School who was mentored by Pausch, says, “Randy was such an inspiration to me as a young faculty member. The media portrays this man exactly as he is — bright, honest, and sincere. I feel lucky to count him among my mentors. It is very rare to find a person that combines greatness, grace, and courage the way Randy does. His legacy will continue to inspire people for a long, long time to come.”
In spite of so much attention from the outside world, Pausch is committing himself to his family with the time he has remaining. As he astutely observes, “Time management makes you figure out what’s important and what’s not. Time is all we have. You may find one day that you have less than you think.”
