<p>When I gave tours as a young,thin college student (seems so, so , so long ago), I showed my room.</p>
<p>When DD went through the search, she did not care one bit about seeing a dorm. I think that we saw one–Colgate. It was a total pit with a very unusual layout. What the dorms were like was of no interest to her at all. She did want the college to have dorms, but that was about it.</p>
<p>In many schools there is such a variety of dorm rooms it’s really kind of silly to show just one. What they do at Carnegie Mellon is have a dorm tour only for accepted students weekend, and even then you only see one dorm. My son ended up with a room that was at least four times bigger than what we saw that day. (It was an off campus one-bedroom apartment.) He liked it much better than what we saw.</p>
<p>Carnegie Mellon has photos including 360 degree videos of typical dorm rooms and floorplans for all the dorms. I think that is sufficient.</p>
<p>At one school the tour guide popped open a dorm room and there were two students sleeping inside.</p>
<p>Awkward.</p>
<p>At least they weren’t naked. :eek:</p>
<p>lol…</p>
<p>I totally agree about colleges setting aside one dorm “model” that they’ve decorated generically. Dorm rooms can REALLY sway certain kids (like my D). Trinity U. had a model room. (Their dorms are great BTW.) I think Vanderbilt was the other one where we saw a model. The schools that showed us rooms that were cluttered and unkempt actually turned her off; I kept trying to tell her to use her imagination and explore the possibilities. However, she had a hard time seeing the forest through the trees. My advice to college marketing reps is to have a model dorm room reserved for tours! It can be the swaying factor.</p>
<p>Best college tours for us:</p>
<p>WUST > great presentation for info session. Tour was so-so. They provided coupon for D for free lunch at one of their dining facilities. Food was pretty good.
Yale > tour guide was very engaging and provided tons of historical/trivia info that was interesting
Princeton > info session was great (Mr. Lee was quite personable); tour guide said food wasn’t good, and dorms weren’t nice – IDK…maybe too honest?
Harvard > went on Sat so pd for the “unofficial” tour led by students. Great!
Vanderbilt > Black and Gold Days was very organized; however, too many people at one time. There wasn’t time/room for much in the way of personal interaction. Tour was good.
Tufts > tour guide was from CA and excellent at “selling” his school. *</p>
<p>Worst college tour for us:</p>
<p>Williams > the perpetual, non-relenting mentioning of how incredibly diverse they were became annoying after a while.*</p>
<p>Re: touring dorms. One of the schools we visited enabled us to see actual student rooms in several dorms, and this was by far the best housing tour we had. I assume students were paid for this service and had agreed to keep their rooms reaonably neat. Interestingly, all of the rooms belonged to girls!</p>
<p>Psi…Haha…maybe that’s why D was so turned off by housing at Rice, UVA, BC, etc. – rooms we were shown were boy rooms. To quote her, “Eeew. Have you heard of Lysol?” My princess/neat freak…let’s hope her roommate next year is not a slob:)</p>
<p>On a recent tour of my husband’s old dorm, the door to his old room was halfway open. All we could see was a lump under the blankets and a hairy foot sticking out. We all got quite a laugh at that.</p>
<p>DD was a tour guide and worked in undergrad admissions for four years. I asked her about the dorm room accessibility. They are not allowed to take tours to current student dorm rooms due to privacy issues, and that is why they are no longer on their tours…except in the summers when they go into an unoccupied dorm room. Some schools (she says) have a “model” dorm room that they show prospective students…we saw one somewhere…that was furnished by BB and B. The tours at her school did take the students into the common area of one dorm.</p>
<p>The tour guides at her school actually clothing they had to wear…khaki bottoms (skirt, slacks, shorts) and a school shirt (issued to them by the admissions office). They also had rain gear and fleece tops for different kinds of weather. </p>
<p>I chuckled when I read the description of the Davidson guide from a previous poster. Ours was a Lilly Pulitzer dressed young lady complete with the pearls and a sweater tied around her shoulder. She wasn’t really able to answer the questions on our tour particularly well which was odd…the students there are quite bright. Still…we all loved the school. </p>
<p>The worst was Claremont McKenna where the guide looked like she rolled out of bed for tour.</p>
<p>Well I’ve had a couple funny/good/bad experiences</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Right at the end of the JHU tour a couple of guys from the college came up to our group and bit into beer cans and screamed something I couldn’t make out.</p></li>
<li><p>Gettysburg admissions office felt far too much like a home! (it was in a home afterall) I don’t know why but I prefer colleges to not feel like my house xD</p></li>
<li><p>Gettysburg cafeteria people are nice, with great food haha.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I saw dorm rooms on very few tours. Sometimes the tour guide would show us his/hers, but most often they weren’t on the schedule. At NYU (as Hunt observed), they had an unoccupied Potemkin Dorm Room to show people, complete with IKEA-quality decoration. Great, except that the room had an unmistakable “baked-in” odor that was completely overwhelming. I don’t think many of the kids recognized it – where had THEY ever been that you could smoke that much dope indoors without ventilating? – but many of the parents started to giggle and roll their eyes, and of course the drug-use question suddenly occurred to several people.</p>
<p>That’s probably why colleges don’t include dorm rooms on the tours. Too many things that can go wrong.</p>
<p>“That’s probably why colleges don’t include dorm rooms on the tours.”</p>
<p>That, and the fact that dorm space in the selective colleges is at a great premium. If you’ve got even one room of freshmen tripled up, it’s really hard to justify keeping a dorm room unoccupied just for marketing purposes. However irritated visiting parents may be about not seeing a dorm room, the parent paying $50k/year for their kid to sleep in a walled-off foyer is going to be a much bigger pain in the college’s neck.</p>
<p>We had read wonderful things about the dorms at Fordham Lincoln Center Campus. The room (well, actually apartment) we were shown was so filthy that even H made a remark about it.</p>
<p>A personal dislike of mine is when the info session concludes, the presenter introduces 5 or 8 or 10 students who each give some information about themselves (where they are from, their major, etc.) and then the audience is told to distribute themselves by the tour guide that seems of most interest. Maybe it’s just shades of gym class team-picking memories, but I always feel so bad when the majority of the room gravitates to the cutest / well-dressed kids and the kids with the accents / the dorky clothing / from other countries / the spiked hair and piercings / the uncommon major have one or two stragglers who couldn’t get to the cute guides fast enough. It makes me SO uncomfortable to see it done this way. </p>
<p>I would rather they just divided the room and assigned this section to tour guide #1, that section to tour guide #2, etc. Or done something that will fall out naturally (all Jan/Feb/Mar birthdays go to tour guide #1, Apr/May/June to tour guide #2, etc.).</p>
<p>anothercrazymom - agree with you on William & Mary - best tour by far. The tour guide was informative, funny and well-known on campus. He gave us bits of W & M history that I still remember - even though S1 chose to go to Wake instead.</p>
<p>Oddest recent tour experience - I won’t name the college - known as a preppy LAC - student who spoke at the info session was as unpreppy as could be - wearing a long ragged skirt and a t-shirt advertising a bail bondsman! She was dressed so inappropriately that it was distracting. After the tour, we returned to the admissions office and there she was again - sitting at the main reception desk - covering for the receptionist (who had been very professionally dressed in a summer suit) while she was at lunch. Honestly - she looked like a homeless person who had wandered in off the street. It made a very bad impression.</p>
<p>How DO you get your quotes into that nifty box ? Anyway,
<<
That’s probably why colleges don’t include dorm rooms on the tours. Too many things that can go wrong. >></p>
<p>That occurred to me too. Maybe they fear there will be smoke wafting from a room, Jim Beam bottles on the floor, kids ‘in bed’… which is perhaps TOO valuable information – make or break? – for some of us parents. </p>
<p>As I always say “never underestimate the power of denial.” If the dorm doors stay locked, then there’s no evidence of shenanigans, then there aren’t any shenanigans. Uh huh, yup, I was born yesterday, after all.</p>
<p>@laffter: Write [qu<em>te] before the passage you are quoting and [/qu</em>te] after, with the asterisk replaced by an “o”. In other words, put “quote” in square brackets followed by “/quote”. Use the “Preview Post” button to check. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>To attribute a quote, do this: [qu<em>te=coase]That is how it is done.[/qu</em>te] to get :</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>some of the schools we visited were very generous with goodies; I admit I liked that. Hamilton opened their breakfast cafe to the whole troop, then comped lunch. Rochester gave D a t-shirt. Elmira College gave the students a tote bag. It’s the little things…</p>
<p>Our worse tour on our very recent trip was at one school where the tour guide was so rapid-fire and disengaged when answering questions that both I and my S disengaged quite quickly from the tour and school. At same school, the admissions officer at the info session pretty much said that if you went to a public school that didn’t send a ton of kids to college, and you weren’t the valedictorian, no chance for you (this, BTW, was a selective LAC but not by any means the most selective we saw). Needless to say, my S from such a public school will happily take the advice and not apply.</p>
<p>Our best tour? Where a very liberal college had the tour led by the president of the Colleger Republicans. My S leans conservative and this greatly reassured him that he wouldn’t be the only one if he went there. </p>
<p>We loved that Bates gave us free passes to the dining hall for lunch when we arrived early. We disliked the fact that Vassar really didn’t seem to care that hauled yourself across the country to visit them (we just got mail from them focused on getting us to come for a campus tour…which we took 2 weeks ago).</p>