I had the opportunity to visit my Alma Mater earlier today. I was out to meet someone for a coffee and to chat about employment opportunities…for them, not for me.
After the conversation I wanted to stop in and visit someone I hadn’t seen face to face since pre-COVID but I knew his office had moved. Luckily the individual I was meeting with knew where his new office was and guided me through the newly renovated BioScience building.
This building has seen three iterations since I started at UBC back in 1989..and each time it has new construction I get newly turned around.
I took undergraduate courses here from 1989 to 1991 (I did my first two years of University classes elsewhere), and I also worked here during both my undergraduate time, as well as between my Master’s and PhD degrees. So even though my Masters and PhDs were carried out in a lab down the road from this building, the Biological Sciences building still feels like home, like the place where things began.
It was in the is building where I told my two third year Physiology teaching assistants (Jim and Mark) that I would never go to graduate school, and that I couldn’t wait to get out of that class because, once I finished, I would clearly never EVER have anything to do with physiology again in my life.
How I ate those words when, in 1992, I ran into one of them while attending a conference held on campus and ran into Jim at that conference. He asked what I was doing and I said I was attending the conference as a student of George Iwama.
He just started laughing at me….because that meant I was in grad school….and, since the conference was physiology conference and George was a physiologist…it also meant I was undertaking a graduate degree in a branch of the broader field of…physiology.
Apparently Jim had a really good memory…and/or I made a strong impression in that class two years previous.
Today was a chance to talk to someone finishing up their degree and thinking about their next career steps….where to apply the skills that they have gained over the past five years from within this building. And it felt odd to be on the other side and remember having some of the same thoughts and feelings that were being shared with me today…the love of being engaged in science but the desire to shift gears from doing research, to applying it instead.
No matter how much the campus changes over the years, no matter how the reasons for my visiting campus change, it still feels like coming home.
So many great memories in this building. Even though it looks quite different than it used to, enough of the original bones are there to still be fundamentally familiar.
