We went to CMU for accepted students weekend. Our guide was in business school, and didn’t know about CS. There was a time slot to meet the head of department of neurosci. A whole group,of us showed up at 11:00. The prof said it was suppose to be at 1:00. She kept arguing, and wouldn’t answer any questions. Really, had she not prepared anything? She couldn’t just tell us about NS?
The nicest part was that I met 3 other moms at lunch. One with a car and familiarity with the area drove us around, we ate dinner together, and those of us in the same hotel met later for drinks.
Northwestern. Our HS is known as a “local feeder” (almost 20 students attended my daughter’s year…more were admitted) But admissions was openly hostile. I’ve never experienced anything like it before or since.
We visited Lehigh (my alma later) with my DS16 on Good Friday. It was beyond packed (hundreds of people) and the info session was held in their performing arts auditorium. The admissions rep who conducted the info session was amaaaaazing! So energetic and upbeat and engaging. I was so impressed that I looked her up in their website and found her boss’ email so I could tell him what an amazing job I thought she did. I mention this because it was quite the contrast to the Lafayette session we went to that same day. Unfortunately our Lehigh tour guide was the opposite of the info session admissions rep so that was a bummer.
Whole family just did a tour at U of State for DS. At one point my husband texted me about how horrible the tour was. My response, “This is way better than CMU!” I’d taken older DD there and it was the absolute worst tour we’d been on. It seemed like a waste of time to be put in a room to watch videos that we could have watched from home, then have an apathetic tour guide show us the outsides of buildings and tell us that we should look up their virtual tour if we wanted to see inside.
What sealed the deal on not applying there was the attitude of the person I talked to in the financial aid office. I guess I just wasn’t in agreement that I should feel grateful if my child were to be given the opportunity to borrow money to attend such a fine institution.
They didn’t take reservations for tours, so during an April school vacation visit there were about 70 people there for a tour. Did they get more tour guides–NOPE! One tour guide led 70 people through Ithaca traffic. She spoke while facing forward, never stopped and faced us so we could hear. D was totally turned off (as were DW and I). The message was clear–“We bleepin’ Cornell, we don’t need you, there are more qualified kids than we can accept, so we will waste your time.”
That’s weird, they are trained to do it walking backwards, and that’s how I’ve ever seen them do it.
Wonder what the deal was there… They need to have enough tour guides on tap for periods of obviously peak demand.
I like the way Wesleyan does tours - none of that backwards walking. The group walks then stops at certain locations where the guide talks and answers questions. Walk some more. Stop and talk again. Repeat while you make your way around campus. Makes so much more sense to me and it allows a group to circle are the tour guide to hear better,
But FWIW there’s a difference between getting a bad vibe at an info session vs. getting a bad tour guide.
The info session is presumably given by an actual adult member of university staff.
The tour is generally given by a student.
The students may be carefully selected and trained extensively, and in the last case I know that they are, but at the end of the day, on any given day, you might get one who cares more, at that time, that they haven’t studied enough for their chemistry exam than whether the university gets new students.
Institutions do vary quite a bit though on how they select and train tour guides. And that can mean something too. Or not.
I remember some years ago now we had a tour guide at a particular LAC who had basically just gotten there herself and knew almost nothing. Later I read a book by an admissions person there. From what I gleaned it wasn’t that they didn’t care about getting new students, but rather they wanted to offer "real students , not PR types, to give a realistic view of the school, and took basically anybody who signed up to give tours.
28 "The students may be carefully selected and trained extensively, and in the last case I know that they are"
referred to #26, not #27.
Though the last paragraph of #28, by chance did happen to apply to #27. It doesn’t matter if they walk backwards, frontwards, or sideways, if the tour guide knows almost nothing. This was a while ago though, perhaps by now they actually screen and train their tour guides.
In my experience they all stop at various places along the way and talk, and take questions. It’s just a question of whether they talk to the group in between stops too. At an LAC they don’t have to, they can see lots of it in one place. At a larger campus that doesn’t work as well. There is too much to see/ comment on, and too much dead time, in between stops. So they do both. And to do both they need to walk backwards.
I’ve heard this A LOT from people on CC over the years, and Duke admissions clearly needs to get its act together. Replacing Guttentag would be a good start.
Duke was extremely popular in the early 2000s (tied with Yale in the rankings at one point), and it has been content to coast on its reputation ever since. Many students prefer to avoid the South except for universities in large cities (Vandy, Tulane, etc.), and other top universities like Chicago have completely revamped their approach to admissions. Having neither a large city location nor the vaunted Ivy status, Duke needs to work harder if it wants to keep attracting the best students. The athletic scene is not enough, especially once Coach K retires.
I scheduled tours at decided “unpeak” times of year - and it worked well. Many tours with all 3 kids we were sometimes the only ones on the tour. Height of application season and height of acceptance season are not the best of times for admissions offices as they are very busy, plus in the spring the tour guides are ramping up for exams and in the fall they are settling into new classes. I highly recommend dead of winter
Cornell didn’t seem to give a damn whether they made a good impression or not. DID NOT CARE!!
Flip side–toured Mt. Holyoke–during info session, admissions officer apologized for the large size of the group (tour was next). There were EIGHT of us total!!! Made such a good impression that MHC became D’s first choice and luckily, she was accepted, the $$ worked out and she is now a proud alumna…
If this happened routinely one may conclude that they didn’t care.
If it happened that once, or rarely, one might conclude that, though they do care, there was a screw-up in this case. Like bunch of tour guides called in “sick”; by “coincidence” it happened to be an exam week…
Or whatever…
I myself have no idea. I have no data. Though I have been on that tour myself a few times in somewhat recent years ( three kids, and friend of one who was a tour guide) and did not have that same experience.
I avoid info sessions whenever possible. Therefore, I haven’t been to many. The few I have been to reinforce the reason why I avoid them: they are usually boring and unecessary. The worst ever was at Johns Hopkins. So boring, so packed. Dominated by a parent asking specific info applicable only to his snowflake. WHY? Stop doing that, people. We did, however, think the school was great for the right student. Someone intense, studious, and hyper-intelligent would love it.
Conversely, the best info session ever was at Clark University. A student panel led the discussion. The kids came across as smart, likable, and clearly loved their school. They absolutely were part of the reason my daughter decided to apply.
“Northwestern. Our HS is known as a “local feeder” (almost 20 students attended my daughter’s year…more were admitted) But admissions was openly hostile. I’ve never experienced anything like it before or since.”
That’s interesting, we went to both Chicago and Northwestern in middle of February and got pretty good vibes from both of them. Even though it was bitterly cold in UChicago visit, the tour guide got us indoors a few times to talk, and she was very upbeat, you could see she loved it there (which I assume is a pre-req for tour guides). The only negative was that they didn’t allow anyone to visit a class. Northwestern tour guide was also very upbeat (rah rah as they say) and admissions gave us a course list for the winter and said attend any class, just be there a few minutes early to tell the professor you’re a prospective student. I thought that was pretty cool. They also had an extra session for the specific school you were interested in later in the afternoon.
We also had the same experience at Duke. The attitude seem to be “we are so great that we don’t have to bother to tell you about what we have to offer”. The tours were so overcrowded that you couldn’t hear. The guide was the LEAST impressive student that we ever met on a tour. Looked like she just rolled out of bed. Definately got the impresseion that she choice Duke sight unseen because it was “Duke”. I am sure she was brillant and talanted but she just was going through the motions. Ever other word was “like”. It got so bad that by the end of the tour, my daughter was counting how many time she said it in a minute. 27 times! Much to my disappointment, the school was immediately dropped from the list.
@noname87 Oh boy, yes, the “like” thing. In our numerous campus tours, I always made a mental note of how often the tour guide said “like” – although I didn’t specifically count, as you did. In my theory, there is a spectrum: the smartest students use “like” the least. Therefore, universities that would be a best fit for my brilliant kid have tour guides that use “like” the least. Very scientific! Feel free to adopt my strategy.
The worst, by far, was the tour guide at Harvey Mudd. Prior to our campus visit, I happened to have attended an off-campus presentation by Maria Klawe, the HMC president. She claimed that each and every one of the HMC students are very articulate. She said that you could stop any of them on campus and hold a profound conversation about (say) existentialism, Dada, atonal music, or whatever. Well, our campus tour didn’t turn out like that, at all. The tour guide “liked” us to death! * I’m not a violent person, but I wanted to strangle her, by the end of it. (The least “likes” that we heard, btw, occurred during our campus tour at Stanford. That tour guide was indeed very articulate, charming, and very funny. Of course, YMMV.)
The HMC tour guide also showed us her room in her dorm. Boy, that was a terrible idea. The room was horribly messy, dark, and small. What in the world was she thinking? Why show your room during a tour, if you clothes are strewn everywhere and you haven't even made your bed?
