Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" was delivered on September 18, 2007, at Carnegie Mellon University's McConomy Auditorium. Over 450 Carnegie Mellon students, staff members, and friends of Pausch attended the lecture, leaving only standing room as this was more than the auditorium could hold. Pausch later commented about this in an interview, saying "A couple of hundred people in a room, looking and listening and laughing and applauding – hopefully at the appropriate times – that gives a lot of validation to my kids that a lot of people believe in this, and a lot of people who knew me believe that I did my best to try to live this way." The first introduction of the speech as well as the series of lectures was given by Indira Nair, the Vice Provost for Education at Carnegie Mellon. Nair first explained the university's aforementioned lecture series called "Journeys", in which eight more professors from Carnegie Mellon would share their insights on their professional and personal experiences over the years.
David Lynch Foundation
By 2006, six public schools in the U.S. had been awarded $25,000 by the David Lynch Foundation. "NEA Today" described the DLF as an organization "which provides funding for students in grades 4 to 12 to learn Transcendental Meditation" and reported that DLF had "helped approximately 500 students and 50 teachers learn how to meditate and "about 1,500 more" were scheduled to learn in the fall. In October the Foundation withdrew a $175,000 pledge to a San Rafael, California, high school after the anti-separation Pacific Justice Institute threatened to sue for violating the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. That year Lynch assigned all of his proceeds from the sale of his book "Catching the Big Fish" to the DLF and the Foundation sponsored a presentation on the benefits of TM in education at the Harvard Club of Boston.