"Southwest Airlines flight 147 to Chicago has been delayed 45 minutes."
Great, I thought to myself somewhat sarcastically. While this newfound time afforded me the opportunity to grab a dinner that had gone neglected in my hasty drive to the Detroit Metro Airport, I would almost always choose to be in the air and hungry than sitting in the airport and full. I found a spot near a windowed wall in the terminal with half of a pizza and my heart sank as the sun began to dip behind a less-than-friendly sky.
"Southwest Airlines flight 147 to Chicago has been delayed another 45 minutes."
Great, I thought to myself again with more sarcasm than before. I remember calling home and complaining about the pains of travel and my mom reminded me that you’d rather be on the ground, safe, wishing you were in the air than in the air, bouncing around, wishing you were on the ground. I could not argue with that logic and I still had a few chapters left in Astrophysics for People in a Hurry so I figured Neil DeGrasse Tyson could entertain me until it was time to board and that would be that.
"Southwest Airlines flight 147 to Chicago has been delayed another two and a half hours."
Great, I thought to myself with maybe a few more descriptive words before it. My last few chapters of reading had gone by quickly (in a Hurry was as advertised) and I was saving the movie on my iPad for my second flight (that, at that moment, felt way more than 3 hours away) so I needed to find something else to do other than watch the rain fall outside.
I bounced around on Amazon looking for a movie to rent, but to no avail. I then turned to the online Kindle library and looked for something to replace Astrophysics when I stumbled upon The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. The name jumped out at me because I remembered my mom mentioning it years before, when it had first come out, and how inspiring it was and how this guy had worked at Walt Disney Imagineering, my dream job. With only that and the Amazon reviews to go from, I bought the book and started reading, hoping that the rain would stop soon.
"Southwest Airlines flight 147 to Chicago will begin boarding shortly, the A group can now line up. Thank you for your patience."
Great, I thought to myself with no sarcasm, but just a few more minutes, I am almost done.
. . .
The Last Lecture fell into my lap at an interesting point in my life. It was the summer between my junior year and senior year at Notre Dame and my future beyond South Bend was looming on the horizon. I was spending the summer as an intern in program management and product development in Detroit with hints of a return offer being dropped my direction as the summer started to wind down. I enjoyed aspects of the work and some of the praise I was getting from some higher-ups on the food chain; however, there was a part of me that knew it was not going to be the place for me going forward. It lacked the creativity, the passion and the energy I had always hoped for in a job, so I had to go to the drawing board thinking of possible avenues to explore with that in mind.
I researched engineering jobs, design jobs, engineering design jobs and everything else I could think of. The more research I did, the more I found that additional education and experience in a design-related or project-oriented environment would best prepare me for the kind of work I wanted to do, regardless of industry. I had signed up for the GRE and started a big Excel list of possible graduate school programs that I thought would help me develop my skill-sets and set me on a more creative professional path just a few days before heading to the Detroit Airport for my flight to Chicago. Hidden in Professor Pausch’s missive that I downloaded on a whim was the final graduate school program I added to that Excel list: a master’s program at the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University. I immediately googled the ETC’s master’s program in Entertainment Technology once I finished the chapter on it in the book and found that it was a melting pot of engineers, scientists, artists, musicians, designers and more, focused on and dedicated to “exploring learning, storytelling, innovation and entertainment, and to create experiences that educate, engage and inspire”. The program seemed to include all the immersive design and engineering classwork and project experience that I hoped for as well as a breadth of potential classmates, clients and professional applications that all seemed very appealing and unlike anything else in the world.
As the middle of March approached and enrollment dates along with it, I had to make a decision as to what path to go down for the foreseeable future. While other programs in product design and development seemed interesting and applicable, something about the program at the ETC always lingered in my mind. At one point, I went back to my digital copy of The Last Lecture and scrolled through its first few pages where I found something that struck me: the actual title of Professor Pausch’s message. His book was borne from a speech he gave at Carnegie Mellon while he only had a few months to live due to terminal cancer; but that speech was not called “The Last Lecture”. The speech was actually called “Really Achieving your Childhood Dreams”.
My childhood dream was to be a Walt Disney Imagineer. To me, being an Imagineer always meant getting to solve fun problems, build memorable experiences and let creativity run wild on a daily basis… and maybe that is why I did not want to continue the spreadsheet-based work I had been doing in Detroit because that did not include any of that. I got to visit Imagineering Headquarters when I was a kid and I knew that day that that was the place I was born to work at. I wanted to build hotels based on Toy Story, design roller coasters based on The Emperor's New Groove, and create experiences so that other kids and families could love it all as much as I did and do. The Last Lecture reminded me of those feelings and of those dreams and it showed me that there was a place full of people who felt and dreamed the same way… I couldn’t not choose the ETC.
So, that’s where I’m at now, sitting in my new apartment in Pittsburgh just a week before my first class in the ETC on my way to earning a Master’s Degree in Entertainment Technology. People keep asking me if I am excited for school to start again and I keep saying yes because I am just excited to see what school starting means. From internet research and second-hand information, this is not your run-of-the-mill two years of graduate school and that’s exactly what I was hoping for because I do not want your run-of-the-mill job or life. I want to develop my skills as an engineer and a designer and create really cool and meaningful stuff for people. I want to work with other talented and excited people who share in my desire to design and build really cool and meaningful stuff for people. I want to take advantage of everything the ETC and these two years have to offer. I want to really achieve my childhood dream.
And I want to make it great.