The High Order Bit

This video of Randy Pausch’s ‘Last Lecture’ became the talk of the internet (deservedly) this week. Dr. Pausch clearly deserves all the positive comments posters, bloggers, commentors, are giving him.

I don’t know if I could summarize my take on his lecture well enough to chat about it here. But what I can say is this: I’m 99.9% sure I met Dr. Pausch in a typical Evan story.

When I was deciding where to go to college back in ‘94, I applied to Cornell (accepted), Princeton (thank you for your application fee – it will go toward funding excellent student programs to which you won’t be a part of) and UVA (accepted? how did that happen?). Well, not realizing UVA *could* accept an upstate NY kid like me, I was clearly unprepared for the news. And I had to decide quick – see, I had applied early to Cornell & it was tick tock before my application would be thrown into the gen pop of applications. So, hearing the news on a Wed, my family bought me a round trip ticket for that weekend to whatever small airport serves UVA and I made a reservation at a Best Western. It wasn’t my first flight, but that didn’t make me less of a space cadet being by myself -hell, I even lost my return ticket on the plane.

Regardless, I got into Charlottesville later than I had expected. I thought I would just go up to the board of hotels which is in every airport and call Best Western’s shuttle. FAIL. The airport was closed, had a payphone, but no magic board to call the “get to your hotel for free” shuttle. I clearly looked lost. Well, some random guy who shared my flight came up behind me as I hunted through the phonebook in vain. After asking what the heck I was doing there (since most of the 10 people on the flight filed out to their cars), he offered to give me a lift to my hotel. “So which Best Western do you have a reservation with?” Oh shit – there’s more than one? “Well, we’ll try the one closest to the campus.” Perfect – onward.

On the car ride to the hotel, he asked what specific programs I was interested in at UVA. I told him I had applied to engineering, but wasn’t quite sure – maybe something to do with computers, or maybe mechanical. Ding! He dropped that he was an associate professor at UVA & talked about Virtual Reality and offered to show me around his lab in the morning. Ding ding. Getting to the hotel, he offered to wait outside to make sure I checked in okay. me: “Oh, no, don’t worry – I’m sure it will be fine”:: him: “Ok – just give a wave if everything goes well” Smart guy. Reservation? No, we don’t have your reservation – and sorry, all rooms are booked. So, once again this guy bails me out – clearly sees from the car everything is NOT okay and comes in to help. He convinced the clerk to give me one of those “you’re important and we don’t have rooms except for this last one” rooms. I *so* was not important. Even to Best Western. I would have ended up sleeping on a bench.

The next day I went around and stopped by the lab, seeing what might, in 1994, be only attributed to science fiction and Lawn Mower Man – VR goggles, gloves that provided feedback to a computer game, etc, etc. Had a great visit the rest of the day – weather was beautiful, random people I met around campus were awesome, even met a girl who seemed (god knows why) to take some sort of interest. Only in my screwed up head where harder / more painful *must* be better did I decide to Cornell.

That decision was up there in the top 3-4 regrettable / second thought decisions clanging around my head in the years of college and early graduation. I had mostly come to terms with why I made my decision, and the benefits of it until, oddly enough, I watched Dr. Pausch’s address. Time is one of the most precious thing we have – and the people we really care about (one of whom I probably wouldn’t know as well had I gone to UVA) are even higher in the list. What’s a little ice & wind in comparison?