All this happened, more or less.

"Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, who is dying from pancreatic cancer, gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before ... all » a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving talk, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals."

Randy Pausch is a well known researcher in the domain of Virtual Worlds and User Experience.

video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=362421849901825950&hl=en

transcript: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/Randy/pauschlastlecturetranscript.pdf