The Last Lecture

The Last Lecture
The Carnegie Mellon faculty read his glowing letter. They saw my
reasonable grades and my lackluster graduate-exam scores. They
reviewed my application.
And they rejected me.
I was accepted into other PhD programs, but Carnegie Mellon
didn’t want me. So I went into Andy’s office and dropped the
rejection letter on his desk. “I want you to know how much Carnegie
Mellon values your recommendations,” I said.
Within seconds of the letter hitting his desk, he picked up the
phone. “I’ll fix this. I’ll get you in,” he said.
But I stopped him. “I don’t want to do it that way,” I told him.
So we made a deal. I would check out the schools that accepted
me. If I didn’t feel comfortable at any of them, I’d come back to him
and we’d talk.
The other schools ended up being such a bad fit that I soon found
myself returning to Andy. I told him I had decided to skip graduate
school and get a job.
“No, no, no,” he said. “You’ve got to get your PhD, and you’ve got
to go to Carnegie Mellon.”
He picked up the phone and called Nico Habermann, the head of
Carnegie Mellon’s computer science department, who also happened to
be Dutch. They talked about me in Dutch for a while, and then Andy
hung up and told me: “Be in his office at 8 a.m. tomorrow.”
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