You’re just one person, and that’s okay!
In “The Last Lecture,” Randy Pausch challenges professors to think of their demise and consider what is important to them. The message I took from this book is to contemplate my own legacy.
When I think about my legacy, I remember some ideas about what I wanted to do or what I wanted to be when I grew up. One of my dreams was to stop the destruction of tropical rainforests. After I completed my master's degree in geography – and before beginning my PhD – I had the opportunity to live that dream. I was hired to work in a tropical biology research station in Costa Rica. My job was to map the extent of rainforests — features within the rainforest, such as where the monkeys live and to better understand the pressures the rainforests faced. My legacy is that the geographic system I built is still functioning and serving researchers today.
At the time, the area had a significant expansion of growing bananas. One of the requirements of growing bananas was pesticide spraying from airplanes against pests and diseases. Unfortunately, this pesticide negatively impacted the people living there – including their drinking water. The local community wasn't overly concerned because they felt the spraying was far from the town. However, after I showed them the 3-D maps I had made indicating that the areas being sprayed were within the watershed of their drinking water, they started to organize. Community members organized and began fighting for their clean water rights using those maps.
Sometimes, we see a problem and reach to solve it, but the closer we get, the bigger it gets. The trick is to avoid getting lost but to solve something we have control over or access to and trust there are others like us working to solve the other parts. On reflection, my real dream was to learn about the world, collaborate, and, in doing so, make the world a better place. And that is still true today.
— By Vice Provost and Dean Elizabeth A. Wentz