Hey,
I’ll be touring Georgetown on Thursday. Has anyone been on the tour? If so, what it it like?
Thanks
I loved our tour. We did the info session first, I believe. Ds already had been accepted EA so we were looking at the school with a different eye than a still-hopeful junior or senior. While making small talk with others in the room, all the other kids and parents acted like we’d found the Holy Grail or something when they learned ds already was in. I realized how different it is to visit a campus when you know it’s a real option and not just a pipe dream.
I have to admit that I was not as enamored of this school as ds was, but I thought our tour guide really was awesome and she helped me warm up to the place. She was the perfect balance of informative, fun and just polished and real.
Good luck! If you have specific questions, I’ll try to answer them.
The campus is gorgeous, but there is currently quite a bit of construction going on, so it may not look as nice (also, the weather!). The core of the campus is old and historic and is anchored by Healy Hall which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The building is majestic. You will tour numerous spots on campus, including the quad behind Healy, where several Presidents have spoken from the steps of Old North. Depending on the weather, you will be taken to the rooftop of a student apartment complex, where you will be able to look down on the Potomac River and out to the Kennedy Center and the Washington Monument. A good time to take it all in and realize the unbelievable setting you are in!
One other negative (for some) is that the school is located in the flight path of Reagan Airport, so there is a lot of airplane traffic. However, students swear that after a day or two, they don’t even notice it anymore.
While we found the info session to be rather dry, the tour guides are generally quite good. There are many more students that want to be guides than there are available spots, so it is a highly selective process to become one. School spirit is very high and it comes through. You get the strong feeling that the people who go there genuinely love it.
Hope that helps. Good luck and enjoy!
Classes are canceled today. I assume tours are, too?
Well, for some reason, my Georgetown tour was monumentally awful. I arrived early, and could only find incredibly overpriced food to eat. I also happened upon a girl crying in a deserted corner; turns out, she was our tour guide. They began the info session very late, and basically all the information given in the tour was first given in the info sesh. They kept mentioning Bill Clinton at weird times, which wasn’t bad, just…odd. We couldn’t go inside most f the buildings for security reasons, and ye gods, it was cold outside. The parts of the dorms we saw through windows were filthy and full of empty liquor bottles and broken red solo cups. There was a lot of construction, but none of the doors seemed to open well. Our poor tour guide kept getting harassed by these idiotic frat boy types. Half of the tour group fell and slipped in the mud while we were there. The college claims still to be Catholic, but I only met one priest while I was there, and he was 83 and couldn’t hear me. The students seemed very cold and not at all welcoming; it started sleeting halfway through the tour and no one was allowed to inside; all in all, it was a bad experience.
Plus sides were that some of the architecture was beautiful, they had a nice type of grass there, I met a nice janitor lady, and I did learn some weird facts about he Clintons.
That’s a shame. Get used to the overpriced food if you choose to go here. But they can’t control the weather. Sorry you had a bad experience.
We went a few years back. I really liked the school but I don’t count. Son didn’t like it a bit. The tour guide was good and so was the weather.
Most veteran CC posters will know to view annax’s review with a grain a salt - one person’s perspective of a very short period of time.
Yes, Georgetown is a Catholic University - doesn’t just “claim” to be. Given that, you still shouldn’t expect to see the campus filled with priests and nuns. That’s not the reality of Catholic education today.
Also,because it’s a smaller urban campus, yes - construction of new dorms and athletic facilities will be disruptive.
True of most college dorms at mid-terms - they will appear dirty and (yikes) liquor bottles and red solo cups may be in view. If annax has not witnessed that at other campuses, she must be very early in her college admissions journey.
Last, I have found Georgetown students to be friendly, warm, and welcoming.
To anyone visiting the Hilltop or considering attending , it’s a very special place. Hoya Saxa !
We took the student-led tour two years ago, while it was snowing heavily. And even with the snow, we still went up on the rooftop of the apartment-style dorm, which was kind of crazy. I thought the admissions session was informative, but dry, and the tour (minus the weather) was good.
Georgetown is very comfortable being Georgetown. They don’t put on a dog and pony show and they don’t do a hard sell. Even GAAP weekend wasn’t a hard sell. It offered a closer look at what Georgetown has to offer. And for my kid, what the university had to offer was exactly what he was looking and hoping for. Personally, and all I can share is personal experience, I have found (and continue to find, as my son is a freshman there) Georgetown students, faculty and staff to be incredibly friendly and enthusiastic. And the enthusiasm feels genuine.
Our family still holds Georgetown in the highest regard despite the stuffy info presentation and disorganized tour. Healy Hall has an awesome scale and presence.
I went to the info session and took the tour back in the beginning of my junior year. My parents and I thought both were amazing! We had two tour guides, a senior boy and a senior girl–they had a friendly rapport with each other that really enhanced the whole experience. They were refreshingly honest. The girl described her hatred of Georgetown in the months between deferral in the EA round and her ultimate acceptance in the RD round with a lot of humor. “Of course, I very quickly went back to loving Georgetown again in April,” she said. The surrounding neighborhood was gorgeous and seemed like a really cool place to spend four years. The boy tour guide joked that his current off-campus house (owned by the university and valued in the millions) is probably the fanciest place he will ever live. The architecture is not cohesive (beautiful Healy Hall mixed with concrete Lauinger Library, which was built in the 1970s, stood out to my parents) but that didn’t bother me much personally. I could really picture myself at Georgetown, especially when we walked through the really cool new student center.