Love this thread! @bamamom2021 “funeral parlor” waiting area imagery reminded me of our highly uncomfortable tour of Princeton. No gaffes from the guide because the group was so large we couldn’t hear him but the family in back of us had an applicant who was literally crying that he didn’t WANT to go here and a mother who was fiercely insisting he would anyway. Yeep!!! Exit, stage left!
And if the truth be told, how many of you snuck out half way? A big rock…a sharp turn by the rest of the group? Duck and split? Come on…Who else did it?
There were some schools that DD knew after 10 minutes weren’t a good fit but DH always made us stay. Without him we absolutely would have left. I will admit though that there were some that we all kept thinking that it had to get better…it didn’t…
When our Boston U tour reached the dorms, before we’d even got inside, one of the moms asked about Greek houses for. Our guide explained there are no sorority houses due to some archaic MA law, and the frat houses were off campus. Trying to move on with the tour and show us the dorms, the (female) guide then got assailed non-stop with questions about the frat houses - how far they were, how students got to campus, could they get parking if they brought cars, what they ate, various other intricate details about frat life, etc (most of which our guide couldn’t possibly know) because (as mom made very clear) her son was going to rush and live in a frat house, not in these dorms, no way … her son stayed totally expressionless while his mother did her level best to turn the dorm tour into a Greek life info session.
This kind of fits this category. We were on a tour and the guide was moving quickly backwards and we had a hard time keeping up. My wife goes I wonder if they have ever fallen doing that. (She didn’t during our tour) Two days later we went to another tour and the guide goes we don’t go backwards because one of our guides in the past injured herself seriously doing that
My D just recently became a tour guide at her school. I was telling her about this thread and told her to let me know any crazy things that people say. On her very first tour a dad asked her if she had a dentist in the area. She said no, she goes when she’s home. He then asked her if she knew how to go about finding a dentist. She said that the college has a dental school so maybe she’d start there. He said, I know. I work there.
Fortunately she does not get frazzled easily and will think weird questions and comments are funny. She is however, very accident prone and I’m sure she’ll injure herself walking backwards at some point.
Oh yeah, we ducked out of one!! The tour took For.Ev.Er.
I felt kinda bad for the tour guide. Being in front of a large crowd, essentially presenting a pitch was very clearly not within his comfort zone. Very nice kid, obviously very intelligent but if you asked a question that wasn’t part of his “spiel”, he got thrown off and had a hard time getting back on track. We were about 90 minutes into the tour and we weren’t anywhere near the end, we ducked out. We still had to drive to Philly to catch a plane.
That tour and the fact that my DS thought the campus was to depressing and intimidating, pretty much sealed it. It came off his list when we got home.
@Cheeringsection I swear, as I was typing out that little gem yesterday, I started howling like a banshee all over again! I’m laughing now; my husband thinks I’ve gone mad!
Not necessarily overheard…but this happened on our accepted student’s day tour yesterday. I had gone w/one of my very good friends and her son who was also accepted. For my friend, this is her oldest and first to go to college. For me, it’s my 3rd and final. About halfway thru the tour, she started outwardly sobbing! It hit her that her kid would be living at this (gorgeous and close by) school and out of the house. I had to move her to the back of the tour group and tell her to keep breathing, it would be fine, he’ll love it, she’ll still see him often…the it turned into fits of laughter throughout the continuous tears. We must have been quite a pair “Breathe!! Breathe!”…“OMG, this is awful”…I felt bad for our poor tour guide!
This reminded me of our BU tour. Somewhere along the way, I saw some frat houses intermixed with BU housing, and asked about them. It turned out that they were MIT frat houses, as BU is directly across the river from MIT.
She then mentioned that one year the MIT students hacked the BU dining hall system, allowing the MIT frat students to eat in the BU dining halls for free for a while. 
@hebegebe Cambridge does not allow Greek houses.
That explains why these MIT frats are in Boston, across the river from MIT.
MIT Fraternities. Alpha Delta Phi, 351 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge. Alpha Epsilon Pi, 155 Bay State Rd, Boston. Alpha Phi Alpha. Alpha Tau Omega, Beta Gamma Chapter 405 Memorial Drive, Cambridge. Beta Theta Pi, 119 Bay State Road, Boston. Delta Kappa Epsilon, 403 Memorial Drive, Cambridge.
In case either of you decide to swing by for some beer pong?
No, actually, it does not. MIT moved to Cambridge from the Back Bay in 1916. Most of the frats on the Boston side predate the move. I’m not aware (which does not mean @TomSrOfBoston is wrong; he can certainly cite the source) of a ban on houses under Cambridge law, and there are houses, as noted above, on the Cambridge side of the river.
Touring a large university which is near the very popular tough technical institute.
“We both have great engineering programs but we have two things they don’t…football and girls”
Touring another large university a girl and her mother were very focused on the ssororities. Every question somehow related to a sorority. The school is very popular for basketball and the guide mentioned several times that students have to “camp out” for basketball students.
The mother of sorority girl at one point asks rather frantically “you keep talking about “camping out” for basketball tickets. What if my daughter doesn’t know how to survive in the woods” ???
@skieurope I read that somewhere once. I will try to find the source but reading through City of Cambridge bylaws is not fun. 
Not a tour, but an MIT admitted student’s event at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Many MIT Alumni and JPL employees were in attendance.
One of the students’ moms said “I didn’t expect them to be so nerdy”.
A bag of gold for the first student/inventor/entrepreneur who invents a wearable microphone/speaker combination device so these poor tour-guides don’t have to walk dangerously backwards for 60 minutes while yelling at the top of their lungs.
They already exist @STEM2017. We had a couple of tours where the student wore one.
As noted, they already exist. Sadly, I did not invent, but I do own one.