Just for fun...,overheard on a college tour

Oh, OK. Got it.

Sticking with the weather themeā€”visited a NE LAC in the summer. One parent, I believe from The LA area, asked, ā€œDoes it really get that cold here?ā€ Um, yes. Yes it does. ā€œWith snow and everything?ā€ I later saw the woman in the bathroom and reassured her that it does indeed get very cold and snowy, and especially being from Southern California, she should be preparedā€¦

@infoquestmom Where do men wear sarongs? Just curious, want to expand my knowledge of the college universeā€¦

@eastcoast101 Reminds me of a question my son was asked when he was a tour guide at McGill in Montreal. It was late November and the temperature was a balmy 30 degrees Fahrenheit. A parent, presumably from a warmer clime, asked him if it was always this cold in the winter. He responded, quite honestly, that it didnā€™t really get cold in Montreal for another month or two.

yeah, as an almost life-long resident of the Northeast, 30 degrees is about where I decide that maybe I should wear a coat, but only if Iā€™m going to be outside for more than 10 or 15 minutes.

@twinsmama Men wear sarongs in many parts of South and Southeast Asia and the Pacific. In Sri Lanka, only men wear sarongs; women may wear a similar garment, but they are not called sarongs.

@donnaleighg And in Southern California, I put on my winter coat whenever the maximum temperature dips below the mid 50s! Itā€™s a rare chance and I am not going to let it go by ?!

Freudian slip from a student ambassador at a college: ā€œā€¦on such an expensive, i mean extensive, campusā€¦ā€

My daughter is a tour guide and has been asked more than once ā€œ Are all those people who are waving and saying hi to you really your friends or are they plants to make a big school seem small? Lol. They are her friends. Iā€™m always amazed how many people we run into when with her on Camus.

My favorite was the tour guide whose friends happened to walk by and wish him ā€œHappy Birthday!ā€ and he kept saying thank you to them. Finally after the 3rd or 4th friend said that, another parent wished him a happy birthday too. He then explained that no, it wasnā€™t his birthday, they do that to him and all the other tour guides every day every tour, and it has just become an informal rule that the guide canā€™t explain it until a prospie or parent wishes them a happy birthday too. The guides have to amuse themselves.

I liked to ask guides what was the strangest question theyā€™d ever gotten on a tour. One told me heā€™d done a personal tour for a VIPā€™s family that the dean of admissions had requested, and the airhead child kept asking is there a bathroom in this building too?

While on a tour at a womens college a large group of rowdy women came running down a path we were walking on with tour group -the cosplay gals were all outfitted in costumes holding wooden swords and shields. They said in passingā€¦come here youā€™ll love it and continued on to an unknown destination. It was so strangely random. My quiet studious daughter ended up going there.

A current student passing our tour group, loudly to her friend, ā€œB*** I got his shirt and I ainā€™t givinā€™ it back!ā€

Tour guide at top LAC, when asked why he chose the college, told us that he hadnā€™t done so hot his senior year and all his other choices had rescinded his admission.

At my alma mater (Swarthmore) with my DS, when asked ā€œwhy did you come hereā€ he said ā€œthey gave me the most money.ā€ While a nice thing, a little extra sentence such as ā€œand I am so glad they did becauseā€¦ā€ would have been nice!

On a tour with my son at a southern school several years ago the tour guide answered a question about Greek life. He noted the large presence and said off-handedly that this is not a school for ā€œteetotalersā€. My son, who is not a big partier or drinker, had not heard that word before and asked me what it meant. I said it meant that there is a lot of drinking at this school.

So at an unnamed private university in NOLA, a few funny things were said on the tour today.

The tour guide, while explaining the laundry is free, admitted that she never did her own laundry before college.

She went on to say that many students study abroad but in the fall because they absolutely donā€™t want to miss Mardi Gras in the spring.

When one dad asked the business major (Finance) tour guide, who was talking about undergrad and graduate school, if the MBA here was 4+1 additional year, the tour guide stated ā€œI donā€™t think soā€, what does it take like 4 years for an MBAā€ huh???

Other than that my D20 actually loved this tour guide, exchanged numbers, etc.

^Re Study abroad/Mardi Grasā€¦yup! makes sense to me! Mardi Gras is a spectacle not to be missed (with or without alcohol). Not really a spectacleā€¦ an experience, because you donā€™t just watch it, you become it. Anyway autumn as a season is not that special there ( except for the breaking of heat and Halloweenā€¦another excuse to laissez les bons temps roleur). Ah, New Orleans. I miss it, and Iā€™m not really one to imbibe. Thereā€™s a magic about the placeā€¦(and itā€™s not all about alcoholā€¦)

That is not surprising! I had never done my own laundry before I went to college. Nor had my spouse. Nor had my son. Laundry is something your parents do while you are studying! When I went to college, almost everyone in my dorm asked to borrow the laundry guide my mother had created for me, because it was a new chore for all of them, too. And the second week of college, my son told us proudly that not only had he successfully done his laundry, but also he had taught some other people in the laundry room how to do it.

Actually, this is not a comment on kids today (or even in my generation), because this goes back more generations. My mother had never done her laundry before going to college back in the 1960ā€™s. She dyed all her sheets by accident, mixing colors. Her family was not rich so they could not afford to buy new sheets for her, so her sheets were a weird off color all through college. That was why she wrote the laundry guide for me!

my D17 had been doing her own laundry for years before going to college and my D20 has been already too.

Regarding laundry, both my kids learned in 7th or 8th grade and same when I was a kid. Actually used an iron in high school. An education isnā€™t just about academics : ).