Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams (2007) [video]

My current office at CMU is actually Randy's last office before he passed away. He was really fun in faculty meetings, everything you see in the video was exactly what he was like in real life.

When I was in grad school, I heard from some of his students how, every so often, he would get the itch to do some programming (I think this would have been Alice, their 3D virtual world). The students asked him to mark where he started and where he ended in the source code, so they could go fix things afterward, all in good humor.

Randy also claimed to be the person who started the trend in SIGGRAPH papers of including a giant splash image at the top of the first page, as part of his Aladdin paper. Here's a copy of the paper. http://ivizlab.sfu.ca/arya/Papers/ACM/SIGGRAPH-96/Storytelli...

He was also notorious for how he started the first day of class of Programming User Interfaces (a class for non-programmers about prototyping user interfaces). He would bring in a VCR and a sledgehammer. He would talk about how bad user interfaces would make people so angry, they would want to smash things. He would then proceed to smash the VCR into bits. I heard that some students would come to the first day just to see him do this. (I took over that course several years ago, and no, I definitely don't do that!)

Randy was a really great person, I still miss him.

Georgia Tech set up a room in the CS department for a live broadcast of this lecture when he gave it. I had just started as a brand new freshman a month before, and happened to find out about it / check it out on a whim.

I truly do not think it is an exaggeration to say that it changed the course of my life. I was frustrated and angry with all sorts of things when I walked into that room, and I still was after I left, but in that hour I saw a glimpse of what life could look like if I stuck with it through the hard stuff, and it was the first thing in a long time that really got me genuinely excited about my future.

I will forever be grateful to Randy Pausch for his positive attitude and for his willingness and effort in sharing this when he did - especially since he never got to hear the gratitude himself directly from me or so many countless others I know he impacted positively as well. I am strangely emotional just thinking about it again now - a bright light of positive memory in a dark year.

I was fortunate enough to have Randy as a teacher at UVa. He changed my life. Here is a note I sent him when I received tenure in computer science: --------- Hi,

I don't know if you would remember me, but I took a data structures class from you back in the late '80s, when you were a new professor at UVa. I was living in the Monroe Hill Residential College, and recall that you came to at least one dinner there as well as the intramural inner-tube water polo championship game our team played in.

I just wanted to drop you a note to let you know that taking that class ended up changing my life - slowly, but very positively. I was a (very bad) electrical engineering student at UVa, but your class got me hooked on computers. I initially did some programming, then went into the Army after undergrad. I found myself enjoying programming for fun, and after a few years went back to grad school, choosing CS over law school just because of my enjoyment of it. I was originally a master's student, but found a good advisor and liked research, and eventually got my PhD. I ended up taking a faculty position at , but disliked the midwest and large department, so after a couple of years there moved home to .

I recently received tenure and a promotion to Associate Professor of Computer Science at University, and am certain that I ended up here, doing what I love and loving what I do, because of your class. Here is what I wrote in my tenure statement about it:

"The positive example who most influenced my attitude to teaching was Randy Pausch, now at Carnegie Mellon University. I try to show my enthusiasm for teaching and for the material as much as he did. He related complex computer-science topics to real-world examples. He often had students perform amusing examples in class to demonstrate algorithms, and he kept the material at an appropriate level. Most importantly, he cared about students doing the best they could and was both challenging and supportive throughout the semester. I challenge my students to succeed, and work hard to be as supportive as he was."

So thanks! You made a big difference in my life, and I appreciate it very much.

Randy made a surprise appearance at my commencement (CMU School of Computer Science, May 2008) just weeks before he passed away. [1] He concluded his speech with the piece of advice that has probably had the greatest impact on my career and my life:

"Please, don't think of yourself as a computer scientist who happens to be a human being. Think of yourself as a human being who happens to have the tremendous, precious, rare skills of a computer scientist--with which you can help all the other human beings."

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160304152555/https://www.cs.cm...

I had the chance to work with Randy during his time at UVA. It set me on a path that led me to the career I've had in HCI and UX over the last few decades. Watching this talk still brings tears to my eyes. This site at CMU has a lot of interview footage with Randy accessible via natural language search. It does a good job (I feel) of capturing what it was like to talk to and work with him: http://randy.etc.cmu.edu/

Previous CMU/ETC student here - I was lucky enough to be there, and I still remember it.

I was a student at the ETC that year, and it was the first year Randy wasn't teaching, as he was sick. I hadn't met him yet, but the reverence the second-year students had for him was more than enough to convince the whole department to attend. I'm so glad I did. The values and ethics he built into the ETC made it a truly amazing place, and was great to hear his story.

As we are on a forum for startups - I sometimes think about how Randy might have been sharing his Mission/Vision/Values with us, but by other names; how his personal beliefs could be imbued into his lessons and the department itself. He did an amazing job.

Seriously - watch the video. You'll be inspired. You'll cry. You'll want to program really odd VR games just for fun :D

He spoke at my CS commencement right before he passed, was inspiring then and continues to inspire to this day. Coincidentally this is the book of the week in my book club so I've been re-reading it.

The Last Lecture book can be read as a series of short stories and often I just pick it up and read one quick section. My favorite is where he argued with his mother about his name. Yes, his name. He didn't like Randolph and protested, especially by being burdened by an extra "olph" <joke about a bout a computer scientist named Rand here>. Their negotiation ended with "R." but when his mother would send letters addressed to him at college as "Randolph' he would mail it back, unopened, marked "no such person at this address". As he got older, he recognized that "I'm so appreciative of my mother on so many fronts that if she wants to burden me with an unnecessary "olph" whenever she's around, I'm more than happy to put up with it. Life's too short. Somehow, with the passage of time, and the deadlines that life imposes, surrendering became the right thing to do."

Another fantastic talk of his is about time management: https://youtu.be/oTugjssqOT0

He also wrote a book titled 'The Last Lecture', cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Lecture

Highly recommended.

Previously commented here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12421073

One of the first viral videos that reached people not online all the time. Pre-Facebook for most people.

I tried to watch this every year. Inspirational. RIP Randy.

I had never heard of Randy Pausch or seen this before but I’m glad I have now. I thought I was just being inspired. When he mentioned his legacy of Alice though I was shocked since that was my first exposure to programming when I was 12. This man has altered the past decade of my life with that and will alter the next decade of my life now that I’ve seen this. Amazing stuff.

I try to re-watch this once a year. Always puts things in perspective for me.

I clicked the link and saw the video was over an hour and half long and immediately was like "Ain't Nobody Got Time For That". Reaching for the back button on my mouse.

Here I am just finished watching the entire video and a sense of joy and delight that teachers like Randy Rausch exist. What a great person, mind, and storyteller.

Watched this 12 years ago for the first time as a junior dev - new to the workforce. In short, his words help me every day of my life. My life would not be the same if it wasn't for his last lecture.

I have read his book "The Last Lecture" and I found it to be made up and over the top. The motivation he lists seem to be contrived and he comes off as pretty arrogant and narcissistic. Though I liked the part at the end where he discusses the motivation behind writing the book -- some sort of memory of him for his children.

Thanks for the reminder. I read his book years ago and it really hit home. I should re-read it.

Thank you for sharing this.

If he could only see the state of VR now.

Such a classic.

The first time this went around in 2007, watching it made me feel like an alien. Everybody seemed to find it so inspiring, but I just found it kind of sad. The whole thing about being a Disney engineer seemed like such a manufactured dream. I don't want to criticize someone who died too young, but it just all seems so empty to me. I don't understand why a tenured professor who has all the freedom in the world would choose to go out of his way to work for such an evil corporation. It's kind of funny that Disney ended up being the embodiment of all the villains in their movies.