This is the 4th of 10 geocaches that I have hidden as part of my Capstone project for my Master of Liberal Arts degree. There are also 10 corresponding trackables being released at an event on 3/13/16 in Baltimore, MD that go along with these caches. Each trackable and cache signifies a course I took in the program. My goal is to share my experiences in each class and hope that you will also be inspired to share some of your experiences with this cache.
Welcome to the medical campus of the university I attend! I had actually never wandered around this part of campus before and had fun dodging security guards and the eyes of muggles peering from the classrooms.
In this course we examined ideas of utopia and dystopian societies in science fiction literature. We began of course with Thomas More’s Utopia and worked our way through works like Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Bellamy’s Looking Backwards, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, William Gibson’s Neuromancer and eventually worked our way up to contemporary young adult fiction like Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy.
It was interesting to sit and think about geocaching in terms of utopia and dystopia. I wondered if the world would be more utopian if more people geocached. Would we have a happy society where everyone caches? Or would it be more dystopian because our hobby would be diluted and everyone would be expected to geocache and would it take away some of the thrill and the fun?
I thought a medical campus would be a good place for a sci-fi cache since medical technology is often used in science fiction. You have robotics which are not used in surgery. There is now the technology to 3-D print artificial limbs. And of course looking at the Armstrong Medical Education Building immediately sparked images of space travel in my mind.
In your log feel free to share your favorite utopian or dystopian book or movie. I’ve recently become a fan of the Divergent series movies myself.