<p>
</p>
<p>Wouldn’t having a meal in the dining hall while visiting be the best way to find out the quality of the food? :)</p>
<p>Our plan was ALWAYS to eat on campus for lunch and to have a decent dinner in the community somewhere.</p>
<p>That way, the kid gets the actual experience for him/herself.</p>
<p>We had a wonderful guide at Whitman. He was greeted by so many people across campus I started to wonder if they were plants 
So far Whitman is at the top of SpyKid1’s list.</p>
<p>My S2 is in the e’school and we rarely experienced stem tour guides. We never expected his specific major related questions to be answered on a general tour. We always made it a point to visit the e’school department. These were the people he’d be dealing with for four years. Better he get a feel for how things work there then admissions. There were vast differences in how his questions were treated, as well as current students we observed being helped as he waited his turn. Talk about getting a vibe! You’re either an irritation to someone’s day, just a number, and you can tell you’re getting a brush off answer, or you can tell a very organized, well run place were current students are treated respectfully (even when you can tell they’ve been given the information before), and answers are precise and you have a good feeling they are accurate.</p>
<p>We went to the state school’s open house on Saturday and skipped the fal da ral and went right to the science department tour, giving DD a much more focused look at the college. </p>
<p>Mostly the day was without incident, but I was surprised and disappointed that there were only a very few fast food outlets open on the school’s biggest day of the year, resulting in a slow moving and massive line of very hungry teens and their parents. DD and I walked off campus and ate in town.</p>
<p>Cromette: I’m willing to bet “Cameron” was either the college president or a huge athletic star. Just a hunch.</p>
<p>It’s always a good idea to eat in a college cafeteria when visiting. Not so much for the food, but to observe the students and pick up the vibe. Are kids friendly? Do they look happy? Do they all look stressed, sitting alone with their nose in their laptop? I always liked to see a mix of groups of students laughing and talking, with a few who were sitting alone studying or doing work.</p>
<p>LOL - One might think. However…no. I truly believe this guide was just a bit ditzy and truly wrapped up in her boyfriend more than anyone could imagine and just felt the need to let us know what his daily life was like…where he ate lunch, which dorm he lived in, which bike rack he used, what meal plan he has, etc.</p>
<p>Her peppy speech was patterned with “like” and “you know?” and “awesome, blossom!”, and little cheery head tilts. It was quite entertaining. :D</p>
<p>We had a tour guide this weekend who I was sure was going to fall. Just walking forward seem to be a slight challenge for him as his right foot turned in quite a bit. So when he started walking backward (in flip flops and socks) I prepared myself for disaster. And it almost came: he seemed to stub the heel but caught himself in time. Thankfully he decided it was better to walk forward after that. It was so distracting that I didn’t hear a word he said.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I don’t think that’s very different from parents/students rejecting schools like Oberlin for in the words of one parent quoted in an older edition of Fiske’s Guide as saying “Students here go out of their way to dress ugly”. That and its widespread reputation in the mid-late '90s and before for having a campus culture of radical progressive politics, highly engaged politically active students, options for co-ed roommates from the late '60s onward, and a 100+ year ban on fraternities/sororities attracted some students and repelled others.</p>
<p>If we had a choice, we did try to avoid the freshman tour guides. Some did a great job, but I did notice a correlation with DD2 that if the guide was a freshman, she tended to not like the school as much. You can imagine what she thought of this one LAC session: guide was a freshman (I actually thought he did a good job) and for the admissions session, 4 out of the 5 people on the panel it was their first week at the school and in their new jobs (including the Dean of Admissions!).</p>
<p>All in all, I don’t think a single individual will make or break it for the college or university as long as you have a fairly well rounded view of the institution in your mind before you go visit (web, other literature, etc.). It is when the tour guide is one of your few points of reference that that individual will color your overall view to a more significant degree.</p>
<p>DD hated her tour guide at Barnard but loved the school so much it made no difference.</p>
<p>The tour guide at Williams was so witty and accomplished that DS worried that we wasn’t Williams material.</p>
<p>Tour guides can give impressions the Admissions office did not intend.</p>
<p>I like a school that fields alternative and preppy kids as tour guides. That shows that the school stands by all it’s students and isn’t too eager to brand itself or turn a tour into an advertising opportunity.</p>
<p>We (W, S, and I) have toured several schools, and we just had one tour guide that we all agreed was absolutely awful. She was some sort of performing arts major and was extremely narcissistic and self absorbed, telling us not just about all her classes but also all of her successes in the past and goals for the future. We found out where her department was and what the requirements were, but very little about other departments or other requirements. Afterwards, W and I looked at each other and said this school is probably not a good fit for our sociable nerd S, but he then began defending the school and bringing up its strong points and made it clear that he still liked it, regardless of the tour guide. So I guess that one will stay on the list until the end.</p>
<p>I didn’t disqualify any colleges we toured based on a lame tour guide, and having good one didn’t guarantee I’d have a positive notion of the school either, although it probably helped. (Daughters of course formed their own opinions, which carried much more weight than mine).</p>
<p>But I do recall being particularly impressed with the first Harvard tour guide. She was so much more polished and articulate than the average tour guide that I couldn’t help but wonder whether going to that school helped make her that way. I think perhaps the real reason was she was a senior, whereas most tour guides we encountered seemed to be sophomores. Perhaps I just saw the difference between being 18-19 and being 21-22.</p>
<p>^^^Agree, our tour guide at S2’s college was a second year grad. student who had also done his undergrad. at the university…so he had been there for six years. He knew the answer to every question. He was at ease, engaging and friendly. He did not talk about himself a lot but gladly answered any questions about his experiences there. He knew all kinds of interesting little factoids that kept the group interested. </p>
<p>The tour guide really made a difference for S2. S2 went in with a sort of “ho-hum” attitude. He had already been accepted and thought he knew all he needed to know even though he had never set foot on the campus. The tour guide really brought the school to life for S2. After the tour, he was excited about the sch. and knew it was the one for him.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I think it’s a little entitled to think that tour guides “should” match your child’s major or that every set of tour guides operating at a given time “should” represent all majors. I don’t see why it matters, personally. You are there to learn about the entire school. It never made one bit of difference to us if the tour guide’s interests / majors matched those of my kids, because that wasn’t the point of the tour. The point was to learn about the school as a whole, and if that meant an art or theater or Spanish major for my history and chemistry kids, well, so be it.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl–In our case we ran into a lot of tour guides that would just blow off questions about the departments, etc. It was a big negative for our kids when they would ask a question about the science lab and the tour guide would say things like “well, I’ve never been in that building but I hear it’s nice”. Yes, the tour is to get an overall feeling for the campus but it’s helpful if you can ask specific questions about your intended major. Many schools DO match kids with tour guides to be in the same or similar department and it was very helpful. The point is, the school is selling itself. You certainly wouldn’t want a car salesman giving your company a sales pitch on an a new MRI machine would you? Sure, the car guy could probably tell you that the MRI takes pictures of your insides but wouldn’t you want more specific details about the workings of the machine?</p>
<p>I guess I see schools more broadly than just collections of kids in major A, major B, major C.</p>
<p>Besides, I’m there to learn about the whole school, yes - but I would also like to know about the engineering school and program - it’s kind of specialized. The school should make some avenue for folks to find out about the program in depth - either through a subsequent tour of the engineering facilities or a meeting with one of the engineering professors.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl–well, I guess the kids that led our tours were able to do both, give a broad view of the school and answer specific questions about potential majors–why would you think they have to be mutually exclusive??</p>
<p>I’m a little confused, SteveMA. Didn’t you just say above the kids who led your tours *weren’t * able to do both? That you got very generic “I’ve never been in the science building but I hear it’s nice” and that was disappointing to you?</p>