DeMatteis Engineering Newsletter - September 2025 - Scott Jeffreys

My Last “Last Lecture” Scott Jeffreys, Special Associate Professor, Dept. of Computer Science May 2, 2025, Induction of Honor Students into the Upsilon Pi Epsilon (ΥΠΕ) Honor Society If you could share your most essential thoughts with those people who are the most important to you – and could only do it one last time—what would you say? This is the essence of the “Last Lecture,” a practice rooted in a September 2007 presentation delivered by Randy Pausch at Carnegie-Mellon University, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” From Pausch’s moving presentation, my own course “Last Lecture” framework was set in Spring 2015. On the closing day of every course that I taught here at Hofstra University, I shared a story that reflected a life lesson relevant to that specific course, highlighting ideas that extended well beyond our textbooks, lecture notes, assignments, and examinations. Students have listened to thoughts from Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” Boston College’s Fr. Michael J. Himes’ “Three Questions of Discernment,” a practical discussion of “What is Luck?”, and a precise mathematical analysis that attempted to answer the question “How Many Times Do We Die?”, among many others. Following twenty-one consecutive semesters of teaching (with some summer sessions thrown into the decade for good measure), I retired at the close of the Spring 2025 term. Before I left the lectern, I was profoundly honored to provide the Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE) Computer Science Honor Society Induction Ceremony keynote address. What follows is a summary of that talk, entitled “My Last Last Lecture,” where students were challenged to reflect on the prisms through which they view successes and failures. Choose Your Prisms Carefully The 1989 film, Field of Dreams, exposed us to a character who was little more than a footnote on baseball history, Archibald “Moonlight” Graham. In real life, Graham played baseball at the University of North Carolina between 1895 and 1902 followed by several seasons in the minor leagues, including stints in Nashua, New Hampshire, Lowell, Massachusetts, Manchester, New Hampshire, and Binghamton, New York. In May 1905, “Moonlight” was purchased by the New York Giants major league baseball franchise where he rode the pine, watching game after game from the dugout. He cracked the lineup card late on June 29th, 1905. Graham replaced the right-fielder, George Browne, for the ninth inning of a nondescript game against the Brooklyn Superbas. Graham was on deck when the third out was recorded in the top half of that ninth inning and played the bottom half of the inning without logging a putout or assist. Essentially, he never touched the baseball. 1