Pittsburgher of the Year Randy Pausch:
His "Last Lecture" Lives On
GO ASK ALICE
Pausch, who grew up attending a Presbyterian church in Maryland and belonged to the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh as an adult, did not broach the topic of religion in his book or speeches, but he did make one comment about the afterlife -- namely, that he would "live on in Alice." Alice, a project he first began at the University of Virginia in the early 1990s, is a tool to make computer programming more approachable to novices.
During a tour of the Alice laboratory at Carnegie Mellon, director Wanda Dann demonstrated how Alice's drag-and-drop interface allows users to create 3-D virtual environments -- from animal farms to ice-skating rinks to vast cities -- without having to master the elaborate programming syntax that "drives beginning students crazy." In other words, she says, "you don't have to write all the code before you can play."
While it's true, adds Alice research scientist Dennis Cosgrove, that advanced computer scientists still write code the old-fashioned way with precisely placed semicolons and quotation marks, Alice helps students to understand the basic concepts without that drudgery. "If they all quit on day one, that doesn't help," Cosgrove stresses. And quit they have. A 2004 study sponsored by the National Science Foundation found that 53 percent of computer-science students drop out of the major after the first course. That same study found that the dropout rate falls to just 12 percent if those students are trained on Pausch's Alice teaching program before taking their first college-level computer-science course. The study also showed that computer-science students who learn on Alice see their overall grade-point average within the major rise a whole letter grade compared with students who don't.
ANOTHER LEGACY: CMU'S ENTERTAINMENT TECHNOLOGY CENTER
While Pausch was proud of his work on Alice, he left another professional legacy in the form of the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), the unique master's-degree program he co-created at Carnegie Mellon in 1998 along with drama professor Don Marinelli.
Housed in a futuristic building on the South Oakland campus of the Pittsburgh Technology Center, the ETC operates with a mission to unite some of the best young minds from the disparate worlds of art and science -- from directors and composers to roboticists and engineers -- to create cutting-edge entertainment. "The key thing we teach students is how to work as a team, to be interdisciplinary, to understand the needs of the other side," explains Marinelli. At the ETC, "the actors and the geeks have to be in the same room from rehearsal until opening night. You throw them all together, apply pressure and diamonds result."
Those results were easy to see during a recent tour of the ETC's Pittsburgh campus. (There are three extension campuses -- in California, Japan and Australia -- with plans to add a campus in Korea.)
Students were hard at work designing a new active adventure game that uses the remote controls from the interactive Nintendo Wii game system and the dance mat from the dancing game Dance Dance Revolution.
Pausch stressed in his last lecture that "the best way to teach somebody something is to have them think they're learning something else" -- a "head-fake approach to learning." The ETC-created fitness-game platform is one of those head fakes -- a clever way to get young people moving and to combat rising childhood-obesity rates.
Indeed, adds Marinelli, part of the ETC's mission is to create entertainment that is both fun and socially responsible. Pausch, who was heavily influenced by his father's humanitarian work, including his founding of a nonprofit group to teach English to immigrant children in this country and construction of student housing in Thailand, urged students to think of the influence of their work on others. "Randy encouraged us to be forces for good. There are enough people out there making zombie extermination games," says 2007 ETC graduate Phil Light. Light, 27, who remained in Pittsburgh after graduation, is one of the founders of Electric Owl Studios, a locally based interactive-technology company that makes computer software designed for young children.
As co-founder and fellow ETC graduate Fred Gallart, 26, explains, while most software on the market offers goal-based games with win/lose scenarios, Electric Owl makes a program called K.I.C.K., which operates more like a collection of digital toys -- virtual coloring books, virtual pictures and search-and-find games among them. In other words, there's nothing to potentially frustrate kids and no negative feedback. Children's hospitals all over the country, including Pittsburgh's, have been installing the games.
Because of his success with Alice and the ETC, Pausch had earned a considerable reputation at his university and even in the larger world of academia. He lost a $20 bet with a friend that he wouldn't fill every seat in the lecture hall on Sept. 18, 2007, when he gave his last lecture.
LIFE LESSONS
In his hour-long talk to the capacity crowd, Pausch, looking casual in khaki pants and a Disney golf shirt, used photos, props and costumes to tell the audience how he had achieved most of his childhood dreams -- from flying weightless to working at Disney to writing an entry in the World Book Encyclopedia on virtual reality -- and offered advice on how they could, too.
He began with an apology: "If I'm not as depressed as you think I should be, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I'm dying and I'm having fun. And I'm going to keep having fun every day I have left because there's no other way to play it." Added Pausch: "Never underestimate the importance of having fun." After all, he said, "We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand." Some of his other advice included:
1. Be honest.
2. Be a team player.
3. Dream big.
4. Don't complain. Work harder.
5. Never give up.
6. Be a communitarian.
7. Learn to apologize.
8. Show gratitude.
9. Never lose your sense of childhood wonder.
10. Choose to be like cheerful Tigger not like
gloomy Eeyore of Winnie the Pooh fame.
"It's just common sense, it's not rocket-science, but he truly inspired people," says Michele Reiss, Ph.D., Pausch's psychotherapist. "Under the worst situation, you can laugh, love and live, he taught us."
Shortly after he gave the lecture, it was uploaded to the Internet, and Pausch became a worldwide celebrity. Time magazine named him among 100 of its "World's Most Influential People." President George W. Bush sent him a letter thanking him for his "unwavering commitment to our Nation's youth" and praising him for his "brave battle with cancer." Oprah Winfrey flew him to Chicago to appear on her television show. Pittsburgh City Council declared Nov. 19, 2007, "Randy Pausch Day" in Pittsburgh. A Randy Pausch fan club shot up on the social-networking site Facebook.com and soon drew thousands of members from here to Sydney, Australia.
One of those fans, Michael Halpin Jr., of Olympia, Wash., posted the following remembrance on the site's "wall," or public message board: "I have Mr. Pausch's photo taped to my wall so that every day when I wake up, I am reminded that I am capable of doing whatever I set my mind towards doing. I saw his show on PBS and it really changed my life. I still have a journey ahead of me, but I now have inspiration that I didn't have before."
No one, says friend Steve Seabolt, an executive at video game-maker Electronic Arts, was more surprised by his sudden fame than Pausch himself. Friends ribbed him for his newfound status as "St. Randy of Pittsburgh," but all agree that Pausch never let fame go to his head. "The week he died, he talked to me about the privilege he had to be helpful to others," says Virginia Pausch, his mother.
By writing in his memoir about the benefits of his mental-health counseling sessions, sessions he attended for 18 months with his wife, Pausch "let others know that they deserve to get help," says Reiss. In those months, Pausch and his wife sought help "coping with the fear and stress associated with this amazing, out-of-the-blue sense of time pressure. They wanted to know how to help, support and love each other, and how to maintain some kind of normalcy for their children," Reiss explains. "He and Jai made the decision to share something very private so others would know that you could be as strong of mind as they were and need therapy."
Reiss says she now gets e-mail from people all over the country and world asking for help finding a therapist. Although Jai Pausch says through a family spokesman that her emotions are still too raw to allow her to give full-length interviews, she also says that her husband's decision to speak out about the benefits of counseling remains a key part of his legacy.
CHAMPIONING PANCREATIC-CANCER RESEARCH
Another part of Pausch's legacy will be the way he spread awareness about the need for pancreatic-cancer research, says Julie Fleshman, president and CEO of the nonprofit Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, an advocacy group. Pausch traveled with Fleshman to Washington, D.C., on March 13, 2008, to testify before Congress about the need to increase federal funding for pancreatic-cancer research. "There have been no advancements in treatment since the 1930s," explains Fleshman, blaming the lack of progress, in part, on the lack of a patient-spokesperson for the disease. They simply die too quickly. Pausch himself was hospitalized just days before his trip, but Fleshman says that he told doctors, "‘You have to let me out. This is something I have to do.'"
His stand appeared to work. He helped introduce a plan to members of Congress, including members of the House Leadership; the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education; and members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. That plan would create a new, targeted research program at the National Cancer Institute with a focus on pancreatic cancer. Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) and Ginny Brown-Waite (R-Fla.) introduced the plan as a new bill in the U.S. House of Representatives. The result? "A huge, giant step forward in fighting this disease," Fleshman concludes. "We can move forward with a different momentum because of what he did. Randy would be so thrilled that all the work he did led [to this]."
After all these years of struggling to raise awareness, how did advocates for pancreatic-cancer research find a champion in Pausch? Why did Congress care? "Randy was an amazing individual," Fleshman answers. "You were drawn to him, wanted to listen to him, hear what he had to say. During his testimony, you could hear a pin drop."
Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl concurs. "Randy Pausch touched so many people -- here in Pittsburgh and throughout the world -- with his courage, determination and his lessons of living life to the fullest and celebrating the moment."
Lance Armstrong, a seven-time Tour de France winner and cancer survivor, agrees, praising Pausch in an e-mail for "showing remarkable humor and graciousness while living with cancer" and acting as a role model for others fighting that same fight.
ONE DAY AT A TIME
But even Pausch wondered if the courage and optimism he displayed after his terminal-cancer diagnosis weren't simply part of a performance. After all, as he admitted in his memoir, he had become very aware that he was living life in front of an audience. "Maybe at times I forced myself to appear strong and upbeat. Many cancer patients feel obliged to put up a brave front. Was I doing that, too?"
Friend Steve Seabolt didn't think Pausch was acting, noting that he kept his wit and penchant for dark humor up until literally the very end of his life. When Pausch was first diagnosed with cancer, he had told Seabolt, "We have a choice. We can be really serious about this or go with dark humor." They both voted for the second approach. "Laughter is a good medicine, and it was a coping mechanism for the two of us," explains Seabolt. The night before he died, in the bedroom of his new home in Virginia, Pausch had asked Seabolt to help him review a detail of his life-insurance policy. Seabolt recalls Pausch's telling him: "Life insurance. Nothing like betting against yourself and winning!"
But Pausch received his own confirmation that his joie de vivre was real; it came in the form of an e-mail from Robbee Kosak, Carnegie Mellon's vice president of university advancement. One morning, well after his diagnosis with cancer, Kosak e-mailed him to tell him that she'd seen him driving home from work the night before. At first, she didn't recognize the man behind the wheel of the Volkswagen convertible, his head bobbing along to music as the warm, spring air whipped through his wavy, black hair. "Wow, this is the epitome of a person appreciating this day and this moment," she thought to herself. "Oh my God," she said to herself a minute later, as the convertible turned a corner. "It's Randy Pausch!"
Wrote Kosak in the e-mail: "You can never know how much that glimpse of you made my day, reminding me of what life is all about." In that unguarded moment, Pausch might have reminded Kosak of Alice -- not the computer program but the literary character, Pausch's muse, that inspired it.
On the last page of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice's grownup sister looks at her in an unguarded moment and is overcome with a similar sense of awe as she imagines how Alice would "keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child life, and the happy summer days."
Geoffrey W. Melada, a trial lawyer and frequent contributor to Pittsburgh magazine, dedicates this story to the late Shirley Hirsh, his high school English teacher, and to all the teachers who inspire others to achieve their childhood dreams. You can e-mail him at gmelada@alum.haverford.edu.