Blog Assignment 7

Randy Pausch was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He was in charge of the virtual reality program. His last lecture was given September 18th, 2007, and the very next year on July 25th, 2008 he died of pancreatic cancer. In the last lecture, he talks about how to achieve your childhood dreams and how he achieved his. He also tells that there are always “brick walls” that will be there to get in your way, and you need to find a way to get around them. “Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things.”

Throughout the lecture he provides stories from his childhood, which has inspired him and his teaching. When he played football as a kid, he learned that you have to learn the fundamentals and work hard at getting them right before you start with the more complicated problems. “Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.” This is a good quote to follow. In my opinion, if you always get what you want, you do not learn anything from your failures and how to correct it in the future. 

Randy Pausch motivated his students to work hard to go above and beyond in class, and encouraged them to achieve their dreams. In his class “Building Virtual Worlds,” Pausch encourages his students to do better by telling them that they did well, but he knows that they could do better. According to Pausch, this was the right words to say because the students came up with better and more interesting projects as the semesters went on. This allowed for his students to set the bar on what they thought was good enough. One thing that Pausch says in the lecture is that people learn from their students. He has learned a lot from his students, and he takes all of the lessons from them and puts it to work in his teaching and life.
The Last Lecture has many good messages in it about how to teach, how to live, and how to have fun doing it. 

The first time that I saw this lecture was my senior year of high school. My English teacher showed the lecture at the end of the semester, and we read the book every day of the semester. I was moved by the lecture and his story that he had told. To be able to speak about his life and what he has accomplished during that time shows that anybody can achieve their dreams, and that you should live your life to the fullest. “If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself. The dreams will come to you.”