My teacher suggested I watch Randy Pausch‘s “Last Lecture” yesterday. I saw the story go by in my Google Reader a few weeks ago but didn’t think to look at it. I forgot about it again when I got home and didn’t remember to watch it until I saw a quote by him on a friend’s MySpace.

The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.

Randy Pausch seems like one of those great guys who is passionate about what he does and infuses everyone around him with his enthusiasm. Just watch his last lecture and you’ll see what I mean. He’s a CS professor at Carnegie Mellon that was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I hope I will have a chance to meet him when I go there this fall.

In his lecture, he talks about achieving his childhood dreams. As I sat in history today, I started pondering my own childhood dreams. Rather then write them down, I decided to doodle them.

There’s me as a kid dreaming. The cloud on the far left has a paintbrush in it because I wanted to be an artist. I took art for several years all through elementary and middle school.

I also wanted to be a roboticist. I liked to play with LEGO Minstorms as a kid. I used to build and program LEGO robots and upload pictures of them to the internet for the world to see. My profile on the Mindstorms community site is still online after all these years. The pictures of my robots are gone sadly.

The third cloud is obviously a rocket in space. Who didn’t want to be an astronaut at some point? My friend and I said in forth grade that we would go to space together someday. He changed his mind though and wanted to be a wolf biologist.

But before wanting to be an astronaut or a roboticist, I wanted to be a programmer which says something about me I think. The last cloud has some C++ code for the seminal “Hello World!” program that everyone starts out writing.

I think I’m on on my way to at least three of those dreams. I doodle a lot and design websites which can be considered art. I built a robot this year. I’m majoring in computer science in college this fall. I’m not so sure about my astronaut dream though.