The last lecture by Randy Pausch Page A

would have given them all A’s. What do I do?”
    Andy thought for a minute and said: “OK. Here’s what you do. Go back into class tomorrow, look them in the eyes and say, ‘Guys, that was pretty good, but I know you can do better.’”
    His answer left me stupefied. But I followed his advice and it turned out to be exactly right. He was telling me I obviously didn’t know how high the bar should be, and I’d only do them a disservice by putting it anywhere.
    And the students did keep improving, inspiring me with their creations. Many projects were just brilliant, ranging from you-are-there white-water rafting adventures to romantic gondola trips through Venice to rollerskating ninjas. Some of my students created completely unlikely existential worlds populated by lovable 3-D creatures they first dreamed about as kids.
    On show-and-tell days, I’d come to class and in the room would be my fifty students and another fifty people I didn’t recognize—roommates, friends, parents. I’d never had parents come to class before! And it snowballed from there. We ended up having such large crowds on presentation days that we had to move into a large auditorium. It would be standing room only, with more than four hundred people cheering for their favorite virtual-reality presentations. Carnegie Mellon’s president, Jared Cohon, once told me that it felt like an Ohio State pep rally, except it was about academics.
    On presentation days, I always knew which projects would be the best. I could tell by the body language. If students in a particular group were standing close together, I knew they had bonded, and that the virtual world they created would be something worth seeing.
    What I most loved about all of this was that teamwork was so central to its success. How far could these students go? I had no idea. Could they fulfill their dreams? The only sure answer I had for that one was, “In this course, you can’t do it alone.”
     
    Was there a way to take what we were doing up a notch?
    Drama professor Don Marinelli and I, with the university’s blessing, made this thing out of whole cloth that was absolutely insane. It was, and is still, called “The Entertainment Technology Center” (www.etc.cmu.edu), but we liked to think of it as “the dream-fulfillment factory”: a two-year master’s degree program in which artists and technologists came together to work on amusement rides, computer games, animatronics, and anything else they could dream up.
    The sane universities never went near this stuff, but Carnegie Mellon gave us explicit license to break the mold.
    The two of us personified the mix of arts and technology; right brain/left brain, drama guy/computer guy. Given how different Don and I were, at times we became each other’s brick walls. But we always managed to find a way to make things work. The result was that students often got the best of our divergent approaches (and they certainly got role models on how to work with people different from themselves). The mix of freedom and teamwork made the feeling in the building absolutely electric. Companies rapidly found out about us, and were actually offering written three-year commitments to hire our students, which meant they were promising to hire people we hadn’t even admitted yet.
    Don did 70 percent of the work on the ETC and deserves more than 70 percent of the credit. He has also created a satellite campus in Australia, with plans for other campuses in Korea and Singapore. Hundreds of students I’ll never know, all over the world, will be able to fulfill their craziest childhood dreams. That feels great.

27
The Promised Land
    E NABLING THE dreams of others can be done on several different scales. You can do it one on one, the way I worked with Tommy, the Star Wars dreamer. You can do it with fifty or a hundred people at a time, the way we did in the Building Virtual Worlds class or at the ETC. And, if you have large ambitions and a measure of