“Last Lecture” Series: The Last Lecture of Randy Pausch

You may not know the guy, and you may not have heard of this before, but this is one great lec­ture. The one I’m post­ing here is just a sum­mary of it. If you want to watch the full lec­ture, go to YouTube and search for Randy Pausch — Last Lec­ture.

Pausch has been a co-founder, along with Don Marinelli, of Carnegie-Mellon U’s Enter­tain­ment Tech­nol­ogy Cen­ter (ETC) and he started the Build­ing Vir­tual Worlds course at CMU and taught it for ten years. He has been a National Sci­ence Foun­da­tion Pres­i­den­tial Young Inves­ti­ga­tor, and a Lilly Foun­da­tion Teach­ing Fel­low. Pausch was a pro­fes­sor in the Depart­ment of Com­puter Sci­ence at the Uni­ver­sity of Virginia’s School of Engi­neer­ing and Applied Sci­ence from 1988 until 1997. He has done sab­bat­i­cals at Walt Dis­ney Imag­i­neer­ing and Elec­tronic Arts (EA), and con­sulted with Google on user inter­face design. Pausch is the author or co-author of five books and over 70 arti­cles, and the founder of the Alice soft­ware project.

Pausch has been diag­nosed with ter­mi­nal pan­cre­atic can­cer and was told in August 2007 to expect a remain­ing three to six months of good health.

Pausch deliv­ered this Last Pub­lic Lec­ture, enti­tled “Really Achiev­ing Your Child­hood Dreams”, at Carnegie-Mellon Uni­ver­sity on Sep­tem­ber 18, 2007.

1. Real Great­ness
2. From the Mouth of Babes