My first experience of SFU’s Burnaby campus was struggling to find TASC 9204 for an absurd amount of time. Even with the help of Google Maps, SFU Snap, the campus maps, and strangers (none of whom actually knew where the room was), first-year me decided that SFU was, indeed, a maze.
Three years later, I still get lost . . . which is actually really exciting.
Maybe it’s not so fun when midterms are in two minutes, but when I’m not in a rush, stumbling upon unexplored parts of campus brings much-needed novelty to my day. It brings back memories of being a kid and having nothing better to do than explore. The Burnaby campus gets made fun of for looking like a prison, with the brutalist cement and whatnot, but I think it’s really grown on me. It looks like the backdrop of a science fiction epic, and it’s no surprise that tons of films and TV shows have used campus as a set.
There’s a bunch of science on why our brains are wired to love novelty, but I think it can be summed up like this: exploring mazes is fun.
