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.
Ranger's Apprentice
In 2010, BookPeople, which also created Camp Half-Blood from "Percy Jackson & the Olympians", created a Ranger's Apprentice Corps Training Camp based on the books. A total of 75 kids from the ages of 9–12 were chosen from 1,300 entries. A letter was sent to the kids from the voice of Will, actually written by John Flanagan, which stated they would learn "all the skills I was taught by Halt [Will's Ranger mentor] in the woods around Castle Redmont", including "archery, tracking, and the art of concealment and unseen movement." The 75 campers were divided into 12 fiefdoms where they were taught the skills and at the end, every kid received a T-shirt, a silver oak leaf pin, and a gold-embossed Ranger's Apprentice bookmark. This was the first literary camp that has sold out and has a waiting list besides Camp Half-Blood.