Randy Pausch

When Randy Pausch stood before more than 400 colleagues and students at Carnegie Mellon University on September 18, 2007, the room already knew the stakes. He had learned he had pancreatic cancer in September 2006, and in August 2007 he had been told he had “three to six months of good health left.” Yet the lecture he gave that day, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” was not a farewell built around fear. It was upbeat, funny, physical enough to include push-ups on stage, and full of the teaching energy that had marked his career.

Randolph Frederick Pausch was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on October 23, 1960, and grew up in Columbia, Maryland. After graduating from Oakland Mills High School, he earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brown University in May 1982, then a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in August 1988. During his doctoral work he was briefly employed at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Adobe Systems, early signs of a career that would move easily between research, design, technology, and the practical experience of how people use computers.

Pausch taught in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science from 1988 until 1997, first as an assistant professor and then as an associate professor. In 1995, he completed sabbaticals at Walt Disney Imagineering and Electronic Arts, experiences that fit naturally with his interest in human-computer interaction, design, and play. In 1997, he returned to Carnegie Mellon as Associate Professor of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design. The next year, with Donald Marinelli, he co-founded CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center, and he began the Building Virtual Worlds course, which he taught for 10 years.

His work was broad and unusually accessible. Pausch founded the Alice software project, consulted with Google on user interface design, and also consulted with PARC, Imagineering, and Media Metrix. He authored or co-authored five books and more than 70 articles. He received the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award and was a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow. In 2007, the Association for Computing Machinery honored him with two awards for computing education, 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.

The lecture that made him widely known far beyond computer science became a popular YouTube video, drew international media attention, and led to appearances including The Oprah Winfrey Show and ABC features. Pausch and Wall Street Journal reporter Jeffrey Zaslow co-authored The Last Lecture, which expanded on the speech and became a New York Times best-seller in 2008. Pausch died of complications from pancreatic cancer on July 25, 2008, at age 47.

What still makes Pausch’s words travel is their mix of candor and usefulness. He spoke like a teacher who had tested his ideas in classrooms, labs, and life, and who wanted people to act while they still could. “Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted,” he said. In his case, even disappointment became material for instruction, and even a final lecture became a clear, generous lesson in how to live with purpose.