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The Last Lecture Randy Pausch Reflection

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The Last Lecture Randy Pausch Reflection
Reflection of Randy Pausch’s “The Last Lecture”

Pennsylvania State University Berks Campus

The Last Lecture began as a good-bye speech, made by Randy Pausch, a 47 year old professor diagnosed with terminal cancer. His speech at Carnegie Melon University became an Internet phenomenon. It has also been published as a book. I really thoroughly enjoyed his Last Lecture speech. He had a lot of good talking points and brought up some new perspectives, or ways of looking at life situations that got me thinking. He talked a lot about his dreams when he was a child and was very humorous and inspirational throughout his speech. He also had a lot of quotes that I really enjoyed and they are what I want to focus on. “When you screw up and no one yells at you about it then they have given up on you.” They yell at you because they care. This is something that applies to my life. I have had presumably some of the worst years of my life my junior and senior year of high school through entering college. I always believed my parents never understood where I was coming from, and if I did anything slightly wrong, they would blow the situation out of proportion. This is not exactly the same thing, because I would not say that I have “screwed up” in my actions, but more, I have done things that my parents disagreed with. My parents would yell at me for reasons that I did not understand, and things that my friends’ parents would never yell at them for. I know that there are individual differences between families and their own beliefs, but at the time, I hated my parents. We would get into the pettiest fights, and my parents never knew how much I did not do to try and please them. I just wanted to run away and leave and or find a way out. These were somewhat dark times for me because my relationship with my parents was just extremely terrible. Our arguments took an emotional toll on me, and it affected all of my relationships outside of my family and my schoolwork;

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