After His Last Lecture, a Computer Scientist Contemplates His Final Months

Randy Pausch didn’t want his last lecture to be about dying. He is dying of pancreatic cancer, and he knows it is a painful way to go. But when he walked up to the podium last month to address more than 450 colleagues, students, and friends at Carnegie Mellon University, he intended to demonstrate that his focus is on living. So he did a couple of one-handed push-ups, sprinkled his remarks with jokes, donned props including a Mad Hatter hat, and generally showed that one way to cheat death is to laugh in its face.

Mr. Pausch, a 46-year-old professor of computer science and co-founder of the university’s Entertainment Technology Center, agreed to give the talk in part so that his three young children, ages 5, 2, and 1, could one day hear his message on “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.”

Sure, he could have delivered the advice in front of a video camera at home — and he thought about taking that route — but he felt that an audience would lend his message greater weight.

“A couple of hundred people in a room, looking and listening and laughing and applauding — hopefully at the appropriate times — that gives a lot of validation to my kids that a lot of people believe in this, and a lot of people who knew me believe that I did my best to try to live this way,” he said in an interview last week.

Since the video hit the Internet, though, the last lecture, designed for an audience of three, has been viewed by hundreds of thousands, has drawn fan e-mail messages and letters from around the world, and has turned the professor into a media sensation.

“It has been a very sustaining thing to have so many people be touched by this lecture and be touched very deeply,” he said. “I’ve learned that you can get a lot more people’s attention talking about living if you’re in the process of dying. I don’t know if it raises the stakes or gives it gravitas.”

He said it was the hardest talk he ever wrote — and he’s known to be a creative speaker. When he was a professor at the University of Virginia, for instance, he was well known for a lecture in which he took a sledgehammer to a hard-to-program VCR (the topic: the importance of making technology user-friendly). The biggest challenge in preparing the speech was logistics, as he balanced time with his family and his medical care with writing. But, he said, once he figured out the structure of his talk, it just “poured out.”

Dreams and Virtual Worlds

For those who have not yet seen the hourlong lecture, which can be viewed online, it’s done in three acts. Act I: Mr. Pausch’s childhood dreams, and how he managed to achieve a number of big ones, like designing rides for Disney World and taking a trip in zero gravity. Act II: How to enable the dreams of others, a section peppered with self-deprecating stories of how his mentors steered him from arrogance to becoming a mentor himself. Act III: How to achieve your dreams and help others, in which he entreats parents everywhere to loosen up and let their children paint their bedrooms, as Mr. Pausch was allowed to do as a kid (he painted quadratic equations).

Mr. Pausch mentioned several highlights of his career as a pioneer of virtual reality. He is perhaps best known for designing a free software system, Alice, that makes it easy for people to design interactive stories and games. Last year he persuaded executives at the video-game company Electronic Arts to let the Alice software use characters from a best-selling game, The Sims.

For many years, he taught a course on building virtual worlds that drew students from across Carnegie Mellon, which is known for strong programs in the arts as well as engineering. The course was something of a phenomenon, and students would line up early to get a seat for presentations at the end of each semester in which students demonstrated their virtual worlds.

Some 30 of Mr. Pausch’s former graduate students flew in from around the country to attend his talk last month. One was Jeff Pierce, a staff member at IBM Research, who received his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon in 2001. He says he was not surprised by Mr. Pausch’s ability to bring levity to the occasion.

“Randy was consistently having fun, and he was always really good about making sure the research group had fun, too,” Mr. Pierce said, noting that Mr. Pausch would take the research teams to Las Vegas after computer-science conferences to experience virtual-reality amusements there.

Caitlin L. Kelleher, an assistant professor of computer science at Washington University in St. Louis, is another former student who made the trip to see the last lecture.

“You can either dwell on the things that didn’t go the way you wanted them to, or enjoy what you have left,” she said. “That’s a valuable lesson to any of us.”

Ms. Kelleher was working with Mr. Pausch until last year, when Mr. Pausch already knew his diagnosis.

“One of the things he told us very early on in the research group is that he wanted things to more or less go on as normal, and he didn’t want to have long conversations about life and death and the unfairness of the world,” she said. “He wanted to just keep going and have things be as normal as possible. And I think people have tried to come as close to that as we can. I’ve certainly shed some tears, but I tried to do it in private.”

‘Fame Is a Downside’

Now Mr. Pausch is spending much of his time helping his family settle in the Tidewater area of Virginia, where his wife’s family lives, and spending time with his children. Some of the rest is devoted to media appearances: He was ABC News’s Person of the Week, was interviewed for the CBS Evening News With Katie Couric, and has interviews planned with 20/20 and The Oprah Winfrey Show.

He has mixed feelings about the newfound fame.

“Being a celebrity was never one of my childhood dreams,” he said, noting that he has received some insensitive e-mail messages from strangers and that he has to work to shield his family from the media spotlight. “The fame is a downside.”

He sees a chance, though, to try to help people through his advice.

Mr. Pausch continues to focus on living. While he talked to a reporter by telephone one day last week, he was riding his bicycle near his new home. He was in a particularly good mood, having just learned that he was responding positively to his latest chemotherapy treatment and that he was likely to remain healthy for six more months rather than three before heading into the next phase of his fatal illness.

That means he should have time to write a book that expands on the advice in his lecture. After all, he had to shorten his talk, which originally had about 300 slides, to just 140.

“Now that I’ve got the bonus time, it’s certainly possible,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ll publish it, but I’ll certainly write it.”

At last month’s lecture, immediately after Mr. Pausch’s talk, several of his colleagues spoke and announced a scholarship in his name.

“In some sense I got to do what Tom Sawyer did: I got to attend my own funeral,” he said. Carnegie Mellon officials also unveiled plans to name a footbridge after Mr. Pausch. It will connect a new computer-science building to a fine-arts center.

“I’m not a sucker for memorials, but I’ve got to admit when the symbolism is that spot on, how the hell can you not be touched?” he asked. “That’s who I was and what I tried to do, and I know enough about the world to know that that bridge is going to make collaborations happen that wouldn’t otherwise.”

http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 54, Issue 7, Page A11