Every year, at the beginning of February, there is a wonderful symposium put on by two exceptional research scientists and their even more exceptional graduate students. Since being invited seven or eight years ago, I put it on my calendar a year in advance so that nothing else can potentially happen on the day it typically lands on. If I haven’t heard anything about it by mid-December I have been known to reach out and confirm the date even before the invitation has been sent out. I that badly don’t want to miss it. It’s a chance to come home to my campus and spend a day listening to talented young scientists speak about their work on projects that are relevant to supporting salmon populations.
The campus is on a bump of land that is surrounded by ocean on two sides, the Fraser River on a third, and a connection to the city, separated by forest and golf course, on the fourth. It’s almost an island in the literal sense; figuratively it really is a bit of an island oasis.
The for had wrapped itself around the land today and, from time to time, it crept up over the edge at this end of the campus.
There as a time that, looking out of this window in the “new” (certainly not new anymore, but it was new when I was a student here) forestry building, I’d be able to look across and see the “old” forestry building, which forestry over out of when I was an undergrad and which also housed the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences (which eventually became Land and Food Systems), under which Animal Sciences (which eventually became Applied Biosciences) lay, and which was the building I mostly lived in during my graduate days here.
Now there is a shiny new tower built to house ESL students that are getting a foundation to enter their degrees at UBC. I imagine that has been hurt a bit by the Canadian government’s implementation of restrictions on international students.
The talks were, as always, fabulous, and the last student to speak had my full attention because her research picks dup where some of mine left off over 20 years ago, so that was particularly cool.
When I come to the UBC Point Grey campus, I feel a sense of home.
