The Last Lecture

In Chapter 25 Pausch tells the story of Tommy Burnett, a young man who wanted a job on Pausch’s research team. Burnett told Pausch about his childhood dream of working on the special effects for the next Star Wars movie. He was selected to be part of Pausch’s research team, worked really hard, and was a great person to work with. He accepted a job at George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic and assumed leadership roles on the Star Wars prequel movies (released in 1999, 2002, and 2005). Burnett admitted to Pausch’s students later on that Pausch helped make his dreams come true because he “rode him hard and had very high expectations” (118). Pausch also taught Burnett to go above and beyond the “smart” label; he needed to “help everyone else feel happy to be [there]” (118). Tommy sincerely thanked Pausch for teaching him the right things, not just technical skills. He now follows in Pausch’s footsteps in his desire to help others achieve their dreams.

To provide an opportunity for Pausch’s students to work toward their dreams, Carnegie Mellon opened up a course about building virtual worlds to all undergraduates. The course attracted a wide mix of students who worked in teams of four with instructions to construct a virtual world; their only limitations were no shooting violence or pornography. After two weeks, the students showed their work, and then the teams were shuffled and they would start again with new teammates. In addition to this undergraduate course, Pausch and drama professor Don Marinelli created the Entertainment Technology Center, “a two-year master’s degree program in which artists and technologists came together to work on amusement rides, computer games, animatronics, and anything else they could dream up” (124). The center was a huge success; employers were hiring students who had enlisted in the three-year program before they even finished it.

The section ends with Pausch’s explanation of the Alice project. Alice is a computer software tool he helped develop so he could enable thousands of others make their dreams come true. It is a teaching tool in the form of a game in which the user is taught, via the classic head fake, introductory computer programming skills. Just like Walt Disney’s dream of Disney World, Pausch hopes that Alice is never finished—that it will continue to grow and evolve as new developments emerge: “Through Alice, millions of kids are going to have incredible fun while learning something hard” (128).