The last lecture by Randy Pausch

expectations and some quirky ways—and they weren’t at the point where they appreciated that. I’m a bit of an acquired taste in that sense, and after only one semester, some were still noticeably wary of me.
    The discussion turned to how hard it was to get a first break in the movie business, and someone wanted to know about the role of luck. Tommy volunteered to answer that question. “It does take a lot of luck,” he said. “But all of you are already lucky. Getting to work with Randy and learn from him, that’s some kind of luck right there. I wouldn’t be here if not for Randy.”
    I’m a guy who has floated in zero gravity. But I was floating even higher that day. I was incredibly appreciative that Tommy felt I helped enable his dreams. But what made it really special was that he was returning the favor by enabling the dreams of my current students (and helping me in the process). That moment turned out to be a turning point in my relationship with that class. Because Tommy was passing it on.

26
They Just Blew Me Away
    P EOPLE WHO know me say I’m an efficiency freak. Obviously, they have me pegged. I’d always rather be doing two useful things at once, or better yet, three. That’s why, as my teaching career progressed, I started to ponder this question:
    If I could help individual students, one on one, as they worked toward achieving their childhood dreams, was there was a way to do it on a larger scale?
    I found that larger scale after I arrived at Carnegie Mellon in 1997 as an associate professor of computer science. My specialty was “human-computer interaction,” and I created a course called “Building Virtual Worlds,” or BVW for short.
    The premise was not so far removed from the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland idea of “Let’s put on a show,” only it was updated for the age of computer graphics, 3-D animation and the construction of what we called “immersive (helmet-based) interactive virtual reality worlds.”
    I opened the course to fifty undergraduates from all different departments of the university. We had actors, English majors and sculptors mixed with engineers, math majors and computer geeks. These were students whose paths might never have had reason to cross, given how autonomous the various disciplines at Carnegie Mellon could be. But we made these kids unlikely partners with each other, forcing them to do together what they couldn’t do alone.
    There were four people per team, randomly chosen, and they remained together for projects that lasted two weeks. I’d just tell them: “Build a virtual world.” And so they’d program something, dream up something, show everyone else, and then I’d reshuffle the teams, and they’d get three new playmates and start again.
    I had just two rules for their virtual reality worlds: No shooting violence and no pornography. I issued that decree mostly because those things have been done in computer games only about a zillion times, and I was looking for original thinking.
    You’d be amazed at how many nineteen-year-old boys are completely out of ideas when you take sex and violence off the table. And yet, when I asked them to think far beyond the obvious, most of them rose to the challenge. In fact, the first year I offered the course, the students presented their initial projects and they just blew me away. Their work was literally beyond my imagination. I was especially impressed because they were programming on weak computers by Hollywood’s virtual reality standards, and they turned out these incredible gems.
    I had been a professor for a decade at that point, and when I started BVW, I didn’t know what to expect. I gave the first two-week assignment, and ended up being overwhelmed by the results. I didn’t know what to do next. I was so at sea that I called my mentor, Andy van Dam.
    “Andy, I just gave my students a two-week assignment and they came back and did stuff that, had I given them an entire semester to complete it, I