The Last Lecture - Randy Pausch - AudioBook CD with Jeffrey Zaslow
Brand New (4.5 hours 4 CDs):
A lot of professors give talks titled "The Last Lecture." While they speak, audiences can't help but mull the question: What would we want as our legacy?
When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave—"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"—wasn't about dying. It was about overcoming obstacles, enabling the dreams of others, and seizing every moment. It was about living.
Randy Pausch has combined the humor, inspiration, and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and created an audio book that will be shared for generations to come.
About Randy Pausch
Randy Pausch is a married father of three, a very popular professor at Carnegie Mellon University—and he is dying. He is suffering from pancreatic cancer, which he says has returned after surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. Doctors say he has only a few months to live.
In September 2007, Randy gave a final lecture to his students at Carnegie Mellon that has since been downloaded more than a million times on the Internet. "There's an academic tradition called the 'Last Lecture.' Hypothetically, if you knew you were going to die and you had one last lecture, what would you say to your students?" Randy says. "Well, for me, there's an elephant in the room. And the elephant in the room, for me, it wasn't hypothetical."
Despite the lecture's wide popularity, Randy says he really only intended his words for his three small children. "I think it's great that so many people have benefited from this lecture, but the truth of the matter is that I didn't really even give it to the 400 people at Carnegie Mellon who came. I only wrote this lecture for three people, and when they're older, they'll watch it," he says.
Randy says his speech is mostly about achieving childhood dreams—and living your life. "Any professor will tell you there's some lectures you have to pull them out of yourself, and there's some that just pour. This talk wrote itself," he says.
While Randy has known about his cancer for a year, he says he learned six or seven weeks ago that he might only have months to live. "One person says three to six months, and another one says, 'Yeah, three to six months, but only because three's in that range.' So you sort of get some shading of it," he says.
Randy isn't giving in to the prognosis—he is continuing his medical treatment in the hope of prolonging his life. "[Somebody said], 'You've become so famous for dying, what's going to happen if you're alive in a year or two?'" Randy says. "I said, 'Give me the problem! I'd like to work on that one.'"
Pausch received his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Brown University and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He has been a co-founder, along with Don Marinelli, of CMU's Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) and he started the Building Virtual Worlds course at CMU and taught it for ten years. He has been a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator, and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow. Pausch was a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia's School of Engineering and Applied Science from 1988 until 1997. He has done sabbaticals at Walt Disney Imagineering and Electronic Arts (EA), and consulted with Google on user interface design. Pausch is the author or co-author of five books and over 70 articles, and the founder of the Alice software project.
Pausch received two awards from ACM in 2007 for his achievements in computing education. These are the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award and the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education. He was also inducted as a Fellow of the ACM in 2007.
The Pittsburgh City Council declared November 19, 2007 to be "Dr. Randy Pausch Day."
Pausch has been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and was told in August 2007 to expect a remaining three to six months of good health. He soon moved his family back down to Virginia.
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