KOOKY: Better than "ER"

I used to be a huge fan of the show "ER". It fascinated me to no end that there were a bunch of actors who were able to spew out a string of medical terminology and emergency room colloquialism while everything around them was total chaos and the very life they were trying to save was hanging on a thin thread, ready to break with the slightest mis-step.

Then I started getting bored, and watched something else. Ha.

Anyways, guess what the building in the picture is? It looks like an office building, doesn't it? That's what I first thought when I entered the Life Sciences Center (LSC). This building is one of the places where the medical school students have their classes. The building is equipped with state-of-the art AV equipment for the distributed medical school program. There are three main centres where UBC runs the medical school: UBC, UVic and UNBC. That means that the instructor can be in any one of the three centres and teach a class in all three centres simultaneously via teleconferencing. And there are future plans to expand the AV network through other places within the province.

My boss has also mentioned that the building has been designed as eye candy. The building's has already been in a few films and TV shows. Just a few months ago, Al Pacino graced the walls of the LSC when he was in town filming 88 Minutes. Where you see glass windows in the upper floors, those actually house research labs, not offices. Pretty nifty, eh?

The building was also supposed to have been completely finished 1.5 years ago. They're still doing construction, although most people can't see it. The area where I need to go sometimes, I still need to technically wear a hard hat and steel-toed boots. I swore after the first time doing that, that I would never go there again until I could wear normal shoes in (a very traumatic event that I may tell on another day). The building's construction has also caused my team a great deal of headache. I'm glad I'd managed to miss most of it, although they still speak of that time with great fondness (no bitterness of course!).

I was in the building yesterday because they were hosting a free lunch for a bunch of doctors, and I was invited to go eat. The doctors were doing interviews. Yes, it's that time of year again, the medical school interviews. This is where people who applied for medical school need to go through an interview as part of the process of gaining a seat to medical school.

I was looking around to see if there were any good looking doctors-to-be. I saw people dressed to the nines, radiating tension and anxiety that was so palatable that even I could feel their uneasiness. I was just glad I wasn't in their shoes.