Introduction

   Some of you may have heard of professors giving a talk called "The Last Lecture." Many college campuses have been known to ask professors to give this speech to talk about what matters most to them. Randy Pausch, professor at Carnegie Mellon, was one of the professors asked to give one. Some of you may know of Randy, but if you don’t here is a little information on him. Randy Pausch was a teacher and researcher; he worked with Adobe, Google, Electronic Arts (EA), and Walt Disney Imagineering, and started the Alice project.  Randy was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer at the age of 47, and was told that he had around three to six months to live. He knew he had to make a change in his life and fast. Randy started to change his life by not worrying about his cancer, but by living his life like he didn’t have cancer.  Randy was asked to give “The Last Lecture” on September 18, 2007 and agreed to do so. Jai, Randy’s wife, told Randy that she really didn’t want him to do this because he would be spending too much time on his lecture instead of with her and his kids. Randy replied with, “This lecture will be the last time many people I care about will see me in the flesh. I have a chance to really think about what matters most to me, to cement how people will remember me, and to do whatever good I can on the way out.” Jai could see how much this meant to him, so she made a deal that he could do it but he couldn’t spend all of his time on it. Randy titled his lecture “The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” and throughout his book The Last Lecture he talked about his lecture, how he lived the last part of his life, and how he lived his life worked for him and it can work for anybody. After Randy was diagnosed, he started to realize how important it was to overcome obstacles, enabling the dreams of others, and seizing every moment and this is what his book was about. I look up to Randy a lot because as I read his book, he taught me that you can’t worry about the bad things in life, but how you should live and enjoy all the great things. As my blog goes on, I will talk more about my “last lecture” and some pointers that Randy gives us in his book The Last Lecture.