The Last Lecture by Dr. Randy Pausch: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Dr. Randy Pausch was an American professor of computer Science and human-computer interaction and design at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He learned that he had suffering from the pancreatic cancer in September 2006, and in August 2007 he was giving a terminal diagnosis:”3 to 6 months of good health left.” He gave an upbeat lecture titled “The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” On September 18, 2007, at Camegie Mellon University. On the stage that day, Randy was youthful, energetic, handsome, often cheerfully, darkly funny. He seemed invincible. But this was a brief moment, as he himself acknowledged. If you knew you were going to die and you had one last lecture. What would you say to your students? For Dr. Randy Pausch, there’s an elephant in the room and the elephant in the room is that for him it wasn’t hypothetical. It has now come back after surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation and the doctor told him there’s nothing to do and he has months to live. These are his most recent CT scans. The pancreatic cancer has spread to his liver. They’re approximately a dozen tumors. Even though he don’t like this but he can’t do anything about the fact that he is going to die. The Last Lecture by Dr. Randy Pausch on Oprah was about childhood dreams. His childhood dreams were being in the National Football League. This is one of the childhood dreams he didn’t achieve and it’s very important to know that, if you don’t achieve your dreams, you can still get a lot by trying for it. Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you wanted. Dr. Randy Pausch’s second dream is to become a Walt Disney Imaginary. When he was eight, his family took the Pilgrimage to Disneyland in California and it was this incredible experience. The rides and the shows and the attractions and everything and he said, gosh, I’d like to make stuff like that when he get older. So he graduated from college