Randy Pausch
Sad news in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette today in a story about the farewell lecture by Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch, who co-founded the school's Entertainment Technology Center. He has incurable pancreatic cancer at age 46 and has some number of months to live.
I took his Building Virtual Worlds course, an intensive team-based workshop on virtual reality with several dozen students from various disciplines, in the spring of 2002. I didn't work closely with or get to know Dr. Pausch -- though he did make sure to provide lots of individual feedback to groups and individuals, even though his first child had just been born -- but I found his lecturing style and general bearing indelible. Very passionate about the subject matter, self-assured, focused on meaningful constructive criticism and getting things done well. A sense of that comes across in the quotations in the article and more so in the video excerpts provided (I'll search later for video of the whole lecture). Extremely committed to education.
I was definitely not a luminary in that class, maybe even something of a Jonah for the teams I worked with since I tended to badly estimate how much effort I would need to get a workable result and not have viable fallbacks if something went awry. My final project (with three other people) didn't make the cut for the end-of-semester show. My biggest tangible takeaway from the course, which I've managed to apply unevenly since then, was a clear awareness of the very real limit on my ability to brute-force any given task at hand with mere head-down effort and goodwill, which hadn't been seriously tested to that point. "Work smart, not hard," as they say, or more to the point "work hard but smart". The apparent point of the lecture yesterday, which I think was an obvious if implicit component of the Virtual Worlds course -- to find something you're passionate about doing and then work very hard at actually, concretely doing it -- is one that I would also do well to take to heart.
Besides being sad on a personal level, his departure means CMU loses one of its most interesting thinkers on/ doers of a couple of subject areas that the school is particularly renowned for.
I took his Building Virtual Worlds course, an intensive team-based workshop on virtual reality with several dozen students from various disciplines, in the spring of 2002. I didn't work closely with or get to know Dr. Pausch -- though he did make sure to provide lots of individual feedback to groups and individuals, even though his first child had just been born -- but I found his lecturing style and general bearing indelible. Very passionate about the subject matter, self-assured, focused on meaningful constructive criticism and getting things done well. A sense of that comes across in the quotations in the article and more so in the video excerpts provided (I'll search later for video of the whole lecture). Extremely committed to education.
I was definitely not a luminary in that class, maybe even something of a Jonah for the teams I worked with since I tended to badly estimate how much effort I would need to get a workable result and not have viable fallbacks if something went awry. My final project (with three other people) didn't make the cut for the end-of-semester show. My biggest tangible takeaway from the course, which I've managed to apply unevenly since then, was a clear awareness of the very real limit on my ability to brute-force any given task at hand with mere head-down effort and goodwill, which hadn't been seriously tested to that point. "Work smart, not hard," as they say, or more to the point "work hard but smart". The apparent point of the lecture yesterday, which I think was an obvious if implicit component of the Virtual Worlds course -- to find something you're passionate about doing and then work very hard at actually, concretely doing it -- is one that I would also do well to take to heart.
Besides being sad on a personal level, his departure means CMU loses one of its most interesting thinkers on/ doers of a couple of subject areas that the school is particularly renowned for.
1 Comments:
Some lessons from Randy Pausch’s last lecture that especially moved me:
1. Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things.
2. Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
3. Never lose the child-like wonder.
4. If we do something which is pioneering, we will get arrows in the back. But at the end of the day, a whole lot of people will have a whole lot of fun.
5. Be good at something; it makes you valuable.
6. If you live your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself, and the dreams will come to you.
Check out the tribute quiz on the lecture at www.mystudiyo.com : you can add your own questions at the end of the quiz.
http://www.mystudiyo.com/activity.php?act=558
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