As part of my pre-work for the Unstoppable course, I had to watch Randy Pausch’s last lecture, titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams“. It’s 1 hour 16 minutes long, but the content of it makes the time go by quickly. Randy Pausch was an amazing, accomplished professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He unfortunately passed from pancreatic cancer. However, this video - his last lecture - captures his adventures and wonderful spirit.

In this lecture, he mentioned his childhood dreams and the lessons he learned along the way. This had me thinking about my childhood dreams:

  • Clarinetist in the Cleveland Orchestra
  • Teacher
  • Something where I can put my love of spelling and grammar to work
  • Astronaut - or something space-related
  • Computer programmer

tl;dr: Conclusion

Things I’ve Done

Looking at my list of dreams as a child, I could see that part of my role in life is helping others and another part is putting my skills to work. In the past 35 years, I think I’ve accomplished quite a bit so far.

Teacher

As a kid, I remember setting up my Cabbage Patch Kids, my brother’s My Buddy doll, and other dolls and playing school with them. I could remember teaching them music and reading to them. I also remember watching my mom teach kids in her Sunday School class - she worked with 3 years old kids. Seeing how she worked with them and the impact she made - that made an impact on me.

While growing up, my teachers have really helped mold me into the person I am. Whether it was something about the grade level, subject, or even just life in general, each teacher in my life has taught me something.

Fast forward in life - during college, I had the opportunity to teach my own section of an orientation lab. I started out in the EECS program, focusing on Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). However, the program turned out to be more theory than application, and after 2 years in the program, I switched to the Computer Science and Engineering Technology (CSET) program, which was more application than theory. In my senior year of college, I taught a lab of the Orientation to EECS. Yes, I taught a lab of the orientation to the program I left - while I knew it wasn’t for me, I left the program in good academic standing and also maintained an active role in the student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Because of my roles with ACM - vice chair my sophomore year, chair my junior year, reviews editor for their national student publication my senior year - and because of who I am in general, the EECS department trusted me with a lab of theirs. It was great to help freshmen who were just starting out in their academic adventure and explaining to them why orientation covered more than just programming. The LED project at the end of the orientation lab made a lot of sense as a senior who had seen the curriculum unfold.

After being in the field for many years, I eventually returned to the classroom, this time as an adjunct instructor at a community college. I was given materials but had some leeway in creating my slides to teach from. I wanted to make sure that my voice was heard and that my way of explaining things was understood.

Currently, I work with the Software Guild as a teaching assistant and in curriculum development. (I’ll have another blog post about that, as more pre-work is leading me to that story.) In the time that I’ve been there, I really have enjoyed my adventures in the classroom and in the curriculum.

Editor

When I was younger, I knew I wanted to put my love of languages to use. Specifically, I had a thing for spelling and grammar, but at the time, I hadn’t realized what jobs were out there. This yearning stayed in my heart, and once I hit college, I was able to put these skills to use.

My first stint as an editor came in the early 2000s as the Special Reviews Editor for ACM Crossroads. I was in charge of reviewing articles submitted for the national publication of the student magazine, making sure that they were on-point, well-written, and originals (not plagiarized). My primary area of responsibility was over reviews of software and products, and I also worked with other topics in computing. It was a great experience as a college student to see how this worked.

My first stint as an editor professionally was in 2010. My friend Matt Hester asked me to be his technical editor on a book that he was writing, and since I liked how we worked together, I couldn’t pass up this opportunity! We also had an editor who was in charge of the grammar, and he had commented that I had caught a lot of the stuff before he got to it. As a technical editor, my main responsibilities included making sure that the book was technically sound, examples working, and things clearly written. When the publisher asked for some developer content for the book, Matt tapped me to be his co-author, as I am the developer mind to his IT mind. It was quite the adventure (complete with “great new features”)!

While I haven’t done a full book since then, I still do some technical review of chapters for some publishers upon request.

Planning the International Space Apps Challenge

As a kid, I loved watching NASA and how the space program progressed. One of my idols was Sally Ride, the first American woman to go to space. I also had Astronaut Barbie, which was awesome because she catered not only to my fondness of playing Barbies but also to the astronaut part!

While I’m not an astronaut like my childhood idol, I still get to do some cool things with NASA, specifically working with some of the coolest guys I’ve met at NASA Glenn and the leader of the tech arm of our local small business alliance. In 2015, I joined them in helping plan the Cleveland event of the International Space Apps Challenge. It was fun to bring in my experience as a community organizer and to learn how to tackle the hackathon side of things. Rest assured, I am on board to help with the 2016 Cleveland event!

Computer Programmer

In my grade school days, I never pictured myself as a computer person. I grew up in a household that saved up to put us through private education but barely made enough for that. We couldn’t afford a computer at home. For most of my grade school days, I was exposed to programs - MECC’s Number Munchers, Word Munchers, Odell Lake, and Oregon Trail being my favorites. It wasn’t until 8th grade, when we were learning Applesoft BASIC, when the idea even crossed my mind - and even then, it wasn’t my own doing. I figured that since *I* could type text from our programming manual into the computer that a trained monkey could do it too. How hard could it be to just type lines of text from a book into a screen? My teacher, on the other hand, saw me noodling around and actually going outside of the script - adding line numbers here, repeating lines there. She mentioned that I should consider going into computer programming, and I probably looked at her like she had two heads. (This was before I learned about being exposed to computers when I was 2 or 3 years old, watching one of my uncles on his computer. I don’t have a lot of memories of that - those are stories from family.)

In high school, my chemistry teacher saw that I had a way with words and convinced me to join the high school’s website team, just typing in content into some editor called Adobe PageMill. All was going well until… a guy who I knew from my classes joined the website team because he was working with these website things outside of school. He saw me entering in content one day, and he told me that I should learn HTML. I wasn’t sure what this HTML stuff was that he was talking about or how he knew I knew something of programming. But I was curious and learned HTML… and realized deep down that maybe my 8th grade computer teacher was on to something. Between knowing that I had a thing for programming languages and knowing that I had a thing for that guy, I followed him to college and the rest is history. I graduated with my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science & Engineering Technology. After graduation, I kept programming as a hobby, due to the job market. However, in 2007, after a few other technical roles, I put on the developer hat professionally. (As for the guy, he’s a very important character in my life - my biggest supporter, my husband, and the greatest dad to our children.)

To Do

So that leaves…

Clarinetist in the Cleveland Orchestra

Growing up in Cleveland, I was well-aware of the Cleveland Orchestra and its reputation. As a youngster, the clarinet was my primary instrument - double bass, timpani, piano, and marching xylophones round out the list of instruments I’ve played. However, like many children, I did not like practicing. Practicing seemed more of a chore than something I wanted to do, and this held true for me through college. Music is a natural talent and something I wanted to keep as an outlet with little effort. As an adult, I understand that practicing my instrument is like honing any other craft. With practice, I’ll be a better clarinetist and maybe one day a world-class player. This will be a dream for me to accomplish once my children are grown and when I have more time that I can dedicate to practicing.

Conclusion

It was neat to see how Randy Pausch lived his life and how his childhood dreams played out. His last lecture inspired me to look back on my own childhood dreams and to see how far I’ve come. If you get the time, check out his last lecture on “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” - it truly is inspiring.