Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

There were a lot of gold nuggets given in Randy’s lecture. Before this assignment, I knew nothing about Randy Pausch and never have heard any lectures he has given. From the introduction of the video, he set the tone of this lecture. Randy viewed his battle with cancer as another opportunity to enjoy life and the people around you. He was a professor at CMU. This video presentation of Randy’s Pausch Last Lecture will motivate you to continue your dreams and enable others to do the same. He uses his own life experience to help awaken your dreams.

I liked how he shared his own childhood dreams. He named several in the lecture and with each one there were lessons of courage, tenacity, and hard work. One thing I would like to mention, not all his childhood dreams was achieved but there were lessons gained from trying to obtain the dream. For instance, he never made it to NFL but he learned the value of hard work and the power of enthusiasm from Coach Graham. There were several quotes and sayings he uses after each dream was accomplished or attempted to accomplish. I will name two. First one, experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you want and secondly, brick walls are there to let us know how bad we want something. These are quotes that I will definitely share with young adults as well as my students at Whitley.

His second focus point was enabling others childhood dreams. The way he did that was through careful advice he became a professor. Professors and teachers have an awesome task before them. They can either break or inspire dreams in their students. Professor Pausch had his first assignment when he had a student come to him with his childhood dream. Tony wanted to work with Star Wars; this was in 1993 and Randy did not think that that would be possible, but it came to pass. I gathered from this experience is sometimes as a teacher you may not think a dream is possible but if the student has a deep passion for that dream help them get there.

Another focus point is learning how to work together in a group. Randy created a course Build Virtual World. In this course several other departments was bridged together to accomplish a whole part. This was a big success on the campus. Students learned the value of networking and as a teacher he learned how to encourage them and inspire them to excel higher than where they were. Everybody needs someone to help them reach their dreams. Parents, mentors, bosses, and students all play a major role in helping a person obtained their dreams. Success also depends on the character we portray such as loyalty, forgiving, truthfulness, grateful, cherishing and listening to feedback. I work around children every day and all they want is for someone to believe in them. From this point forward, like a mighty warrior, I will carefully point those arrows in the right directions.