Tuesday November 27, 2007

A crowd of 850 students and faculty showed up Tuesday at UVa's Old Cabell Hall to hear what could be Randy Pausch's last lecture on grounds; they took away a strong message.

"I actually thought about, just about the fact of what an inspiration it is that someone with as little time left is able to put this much effort into making the most of his time," said Fourth-Year Emily Lorand.

"He tends to give these talks that...the talk that keeps on giving to the people who see it," added Pausch's friend, UVa Computer Science professor Gabriel Robins.

Pausch, who in August was told by doctors that pancreatic cancer would end his life in 3-6 months, was a professor at UVa from 1988-1997 before eventually leaving for Pittsburgh's Carnegie-Mellon University.

Because of his story and his captivating talks on time management, he's been profiled on the Oprah Winfrey Show as well as ABC's World News Tonight.

"I talk about the context of 'I'm a guy who has a very small amount of time left' and I open and close the talk with that," Pausch explained. "But for the most part the talk is a very pragmatic way to give other people the gift of getting more time into their life."

But Pausch's motives are not completely selfless.

He's a father of three children, ages five, three and one, who will soon have to say goodbye to their dad.

"I'm not going to live...long enough to tell them a lot of this stuff in person," Pausch said, "and so I have this sort of challenge of 'how do I put parts of me in a bottle so that they have a sense of who I was and what I stood for and how much I loved them.'"

You'd never know it by looking at him, just how sick Pausch is. He got his prognosis back in mid-August, which means if his doctors are right, Tuesday's lecture likely was one of his very last.

To watch that lecture in its entirety, visit the link below: