<p>Oh I agree that the "tone" of the school is important. A sporty fratty place isn't for my son either. What I was referring to was almost an inverse pride of non-conformity. We're weird and we're proud. I don't know many kids are proud of being weird. They are proud of being musicians, they are proud of liking robotics, they are proud of many "off beat" interests. It's the labeling that offended me.</p>
<p>Thanks for asking the question! I know you go to Cal so I'm going to try to gear my comments, as best I can, to the two tours we took, one summer 2006, and the next during Cal Day 2007 (son is finishing up as a Freshman and, by the way, LOVES Cal, Go Bears!).</p>
<ol>
<li>what do you want to get out of a tour?</li>
</ol>
<p>Parents want to know if student will be happy there, if it's a good fit. Student wants to know that too. As someone else said, who you tour with is key. Our tour guide for the summer tour was a card carrying republican. We're staunch liberals. He spent a good part of the time talking about all of the nobel laureates who came from or taught at Cal. I was intimidated by that, my son was fine with it. We and our son liked best the little history lessons about Berkeley -- the doors without the knobs (no way to get in) after the student protest days (Go Mario Savio!), the oldest building, the fake t-rex in I think it was the valley life science building, the year abroad info. We all liked going into buildings and seeing actual classrooms, so the student would know the good, bad, and ugly of a big campus -- from tiny classes, to giant auditoriums. Seeing a typical day in the life of a student. Learning about the ECs at the school. At Cal Day, there was a completely different feel to the tours -- more personal, you got to know that typical day and the ECs that were being offered. Son was immediately attracted to the Rally Committee (we called them the kids in the bumble bee shirts). That's an historic organization at Cal, so well worth touting. The Stanford Ax if you want to take about a little tradition -- traditions were interesting.</p>
<p>And the dorms -- everyone wants to see them. All of the choices if possible. We did just that on Cal Day (yes, we went on EVERY dorm tour at all of the dorms!). On the regular tour, only one room in the units. The Res Comp tour in Unit 1 was also very good.</p>
<ol>
<li>what is usually left out of the tour that you wanted to learn/know about?</li>
</ol>
<p>Dorms, health services, safety, and tutoring assistance, like at Cal, the Learning Center, which is an amazing place.</p>
<ol>
<li>if you were to receive a brochure about the university, what would you want to be in that brochure?</li>
</ol>
<p>Better to have a great, up to date, on-line brochure.</p>
<p>I haven't read this whole thread, but I just wanted to add that if you don't know the answer to a question, please don't try to half-answer it just to mollify the inquisitor. this happened a whole ton on my college tours and it was very annoying. if you admit you don't know, tell us who might know, or where we might be able to find the information for ourselves.</p>
<p>Ask the prospective students their interests/possible majors before the tour and highlight them or give some information about them throughout the tour.</p>
<p>Try to keep it to an hour. My tour with Skidmore (while I enjoyed the campus and everything) was around 2.5 hours and it got to the point where I just wanted to leave the group to find my mom and leave.</p>
<p>Well, to me, "proud of being weird" is honest and I would hope a tour guide in a "proud of being preppy" place would be as honest so my son could run in the other direction. Some of us like being a little weird.</p>
<p>This is a great thread! Just finished a bunch of tours with my daughter & most were good. There was one school that I was really hoping she would like (good reputation in her major), but the tour was terrible!
First, it was a very large group & there were 3 tour guides but they kept the group together and took turns speaking. This did not work well & we could not hear much of anything.
Next, they did not take us inside hardly any of the buildings... just talked about them from the outside. We did not see the library, fitness center, student union, a classroom. It was so boring!
Whenever they stopped to talk, they left us standing in the hot, hot sun. They never looked for a shady spot to give us "old parents" a rest. I thought I was going to pass out!
We did get to see a dorm room & I thought that was going to be a good thing. Turns out the dorm room was occupied by 3 very messy girls. It was a suite with the dirtiest bathroom I'd ever seen! And to top it off, one of the girls was sleeping with 50 strangers walking through. Call me silly, but I think my daughter would much rather see a model dorm room that is made up all pretty than that disaster!
You only get one chance to make a first impression with our kids! I know many of these schools have record numbers of applications & probably feel they don't need to improve their tours/information sessions, but it would be nice if they did.
Thanks for letting me rant a little!</p>
<p>I am another old parent who had a real problem with standing in the hot, hot sun when the tour guide talked and talked and talked... Just remember, some people on the tour are from out of state and are not used to the local hot/cold weather.</p>
<p>I'm a tour guide at a small LAC and this is all really great, really helpful advice. Just a couple of things to note for prospective students and parents:</p>
<p>1) If the tours are big, at least at my LAC, we try to plan for that and get more guides for those days/weeks. Seeing as we're a small school, sometimes during HS spring break weeks, our tours get huge and we simply don't have enough guides at the right time to give you a personal/small tour. Please be understanding. We the tour guide did not choose the size of the tour, so please don't complain to us if for some weird reason on a Wednesday afternoon 50 people show up and we aren't prepared. We do our best. Personally I try to not talk as much while walking (because in big tours it's hard to be heard in the back over the foot shuffling) and talk more at stops.</p>
<p>2) Walking backwards and talking for an hour straight is hard. I can't walk backwards as fast as you can walk forwards. If you see that you're actually passing me on the tour (this has happened) slow down. I'm trying to give it a minute for the campus to sink in, and to allow myself to breathe.</p>
<p>3) If you're a prospective student - ASK QUESTIONS. We separate students and parents on our tours and still on student tours, we often have maybe 1 question during the entire tour. This is four years of your lives, guys. Ask, and we WILL answer you.</p>
<p>4) On that note, please don't ask me about my grades/SAT scores/how I got in. That's not really relevant to you, and frankly, is a little disconcerting. Questions on stats profiles are better directed at an admissions officer who's actually doing the deciding and seeing that information.</p>
<p>5) I love to get feedback after my tour - obviously positive, and also constructive. If you didn't hear enough about student organizations, tell me, and I promise I will work to include it in future tours, as well as telling you about it now.</p>
<p>Oh and please remember - we're human. We don't know all the answers. I can't tell you off the top of my head who the tennis coach is, or what the exact diversity breakdown is (I know its above 80% Caucasian but I don't know any more than that beyond anecdotal). If I don't have the answer to your question I'm certainly able to direct you to the people who will be able to answer it. But remember - we're just college students. And we got up out of bed at 9am (which is really early for us!) to give you a backwards tour in the rain - and it's even possible we're hungover. So have some mercy as well. If the tour wasn't that great, stick around. Walk around campus. Talk to other students. See if you maybe just caught your tour guide on a bad day, and it's not a great representation of campus. And if we do a good job, a thank you is ALWAYS appreciated.</p>
<p>My brother was a tour guide when he was in college. I'll relay some tips he told me about.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>I think someone mentioned earlier in this thread organizing a tour in the order of a typical day. That's what my brother did, with great success. They would start off at the dorms, then go to one dining hall, then to the gym, and then to health services (in case you sprained your ankle at the gym or something), then to classes, then to the campus's garden (to relax after classes I suppose), then to the library, then the food court, then to the student union, and finally ending at the football field. Of course, the order can be changed if it's inefficient--the last thing a tour group will want to do is start off at the dorms, which are next to the football field, then go to the gym across the campus, then come all the way back for the football field.</p></li>
<li><p>He also handed out an itinerary. It listed everywhere they would visit, along with a brief description, and a little thumbnail picture of each. His contact information was also at the top. It allowed for tour groups to know how far along they were, and also when looking over it in the future, the pictures would make remembering each place easier.</p></li>
<li><p>Be assertive towards parents. He always stressed from the beginning in subtle ways that this tour was for the students, not the parents, and had very few problems with parents asking too many questions, in which case he would direct the group to look around the room for a moment and explore, then pull the parent aside and ask them if they had any more questions before the tour continued.</p></li>
<li><p>Stand out--when my brother gave tours on the weekends, he would always arrange for a friend to "run" into him and his tour group while walking across the quad. He would greet his friend and introduce him to the tour group, and his friend would regale them with a fun story about the quad. Not one of those hokey stories that other people have been mentioning, but something unique.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>My daughters school gave us some great college visit tips and one entire page was a list of questions to ask the tour guide. Without listing every question on that sheet, I will edit that list and mention some that were especially useful to us in gleaning information about student life:
1. What other colleges did you apply to and why did you decide to come here?
2. Is public transportation easily accessible to campus? Do you recommend using it?
3.Are there churches within walking distance of campus?
4.How safe is the area around the campus? How safe is the campus? What safety measures are available-campus police,call buttons,escorts to dorms?
5.How accessible are your professors?
6. What is the advising program like?
7. Are some dorms better than others? Are dorm rooms wired? Do many students live off campus? If so, why?
8. How competitive is the student body? What is the attitude towards working hard?
9. Have you been in any faculty homes since you've been here? How available are your professors?
10.What's the biggest issue on campus right now? What are the big issues in national or international politics in the eyes of the students? Are students politically active?
11. What percentage of students study abroad at some time?
12. What are weekends like? Are there alternatives to the typical party scene? Do students stay on campus or go home?
13. How active is student government? What activities are popular?
14. Are the arts supported here? Are the courses oversubscribed?
15. What would you change about the school? What do you love about it?
16.Where do students come from? Is this a diverse community?
17. What kind of students do you think are happiest here? Which ones are least happy?
18.How responsive is the school to student needs and concerns? Are there adequate support systems?</p>
<p>Phew!
I asked these and many other questions on each and every tour we took, and yes, there was time for other parents to ask questions too!
I hope this list will be helpful to others</p>
<p>My2Angels - We had a similiar tour (minus the dorm room) but ours was cold instead of hot and had 3 guides that talked and 2 in training. Very poor tour - they just pointed at the buildings.... we wanted to go in. It's too bad because it's a great school but both girls I brought decided not to attend and I think a large part of it was because of the tour.</p>
<p>(I hope you said something to the admissions office about the dorm room tour - that's disgusting).</p>
<p>Please do not make us stand melting in the sun on hot days while you go on and on about the school. The best tour guides we've had would take us to a shady spot with benches and grass and let us cool off while they talked for several minutes. It's a lot easier to listen when you feel comfortable.</p>
<p>Keep the talk about architecture to a minimum. While it may be fascinating to learn the history of various buildings, we're not picking schools based on that.</p>
<p>The best tour we took separated the parents from the students, each group with their own guide. And guess what happened? The students felt free to ask questions!</p>
<p>I am also a tour guide for my college and I'd like to address some of the suggestions I've seen. Most of them are really great, but some of them give me concern.</p>
<p>"Keep the tours limited to 6 prospects or fewer (with families). Make a point of calling the prospects in close and asking the family members to remain on the periphery. Hand out maps and refer to them as you travel."</p>
<p>I can't do this. I am assigned to a group, and I don't limit the group numbers or anything like that. We usually give individual tours to families, but we only have maybe 50 tour guides -- not all of them are available any given day, and sometimes we have multiple large groups on one day. Remember, I'm giving a tour in between my classes or extra-curricular meetings. I love giving tours, but I can't guarantee that you're going to have small group.</p>
<p>Also, I refuse to force parents/guardians to the periphery. While it will be the children who are going there, the parents are often the one footing the bill and they have every right to know what it is they're paying for and where their child is going to be living for the next four or five years. They often have the most intriguing questions and/or ask the questions their child is afraid to answer.</p>
<p>I don't get maps from the admissions office to give out.</p>
<p>" I would truly appreciate getting a handout with the above layouts on them."</p>
<p>We don't have floor layouts, either. Trust me, the tour guides are giving you exactly what we have. I wish I could but we just don't have them.</p>
<p>"Offer kids a choice of tour guides-you'd be amazed how often my kid 'switched' the tour group he was assigned to, because he felt more affinity with a guide that, based on 10 seconds of introduction, seemed more like 'his type.'"</p>
<p>We don't have choices of tour guides. Our tour guides are assigned to certain groups based on their availability -- remember, we're giving tours in between classes, extra-curriculars, doing class work, napping, etc. Besides, you and your D or S are touring the school, not evaluating the tour guide. The tour guide usually wouldn't be a guide if he or she weren't trained to adequately do the job, and you're not trying to speed-date or make friends with the guide -- you just want to see the school and hear about the stuff. It's understandable if he's not knowledgeable about what you want to know, but if you have a male and you want a female -- I don't understand that.</p>
<p>"2. Avoid wearing extremes of fashion. I've heard of more than one girl reject a college because she didn't like what the tour guide was wearing."</p>
<p>This is quite frankly ridiculous. Of course, we have a uniform for tour guides, but I can't imagine someone rejecting a college simply because the tour guide is wearing something they don't like. Obviously, we're supposed to be professional, but outside of that personally I don't see how what I'm wearing is any of your business.</p>
<p>"Before beginning a tour, they took 5 minutes to get to know the kids in the group (name, home town, possible interests, other schools seen so far) -- I think that breaking the ice at the start of the tour might make the kids more comfortable asking questions later instead of letting the parents hog the floor."</p>
<p>This is often impossible, as I sometimes have tour groups of 50+ students. If I only have about 10, sure, I love to hear names, where they're from, majors and all that kind of stuff -- I love getting to know prospective students and I have a lot of 'little sisters' who I gave tours or was their student admiss counselor. But if I have 50+ people, it's just not feasible.</p>
<p>"Show a dorm room! On our tours more times than not, a dorm room was shown. Obviously the tour guide has permission and a key to enter the room. "</p>
<p>At my school we are absolutely not allowed to show dorm rooms. If I have a very small group (one or two families) I have sometimes broken this rule and taken them into my own dorm room so they can see it. But if I have a larger group, I just cannot do it, for security purposes. We have an admitted students weekend in April for the express purpose of ladies coming to stay overnight and see what the rooms look like; they'll have to come to that (it's fun!)</p>
<p>In addition:</p>
<p>-I only give view book statistics when asked; you'd be surprised how many people ask
-PLEASE don't answer your phone while on the tour; that's rude (in turn, I won't either)
-I can't tell you your chances for getting in; I don't work in the admissions office in that capacity
-Please do not press me to break the rules for you (take you into academic buildings, show you a dorm room, etc.) I will say no 97% of the time and it will cause bad feelings in the rest of the tour.</p>
<p>juilett, you may not get maps from the admissions office, but you could suggest it, ditto with the floor layouts. Or they could put the floor layouts and virtual tours on line like Carnegie Mellon does. Check it out: Housing</a> Facilities Then you don't have to show your room, you just tell people to check out the website. I'm very surprised you aren't allowed into academic buildings. Perhaps your school should rethink that - there isn't a single school we visited where we couldn't go in the buildings. We tiptoed through the back of a few lectures, peeked in labs, glanced through open doors. We were told when we had to be quiet. I realize that you aren't in control of tour sizes, but if they get unwieldy perhaps you can suggest that the administration try harder with their recruiting of tour guides. Maybe they don't realize how impossible it is to give a tour to fifty. I don't think you need to cap it at five families, but once you have more than 20 or so on a tour, the quality goes down. As for your dress, kids shouldn't be judging the school based on your clothing and demeanor, but they do. That's the reality.</p>
<p>Also, talk about why you chose that particular school. When tour guides do this on tours, it makes it much more real for me and I tend to like the school more.</p>
<p>Mathmom, So funny about housing. My husband was in Donner at Carnegie Mellon in 1973-75. Not great then, hope it has improved! Met him in 1974 so
didn't keep me from marrying him though.</p>
<p>I don't know what the rooms at Donner are like, but my son is in one of the apartment buildings and his rooms were huge. Large living room, large bedroom, full kitchen and full bath shared with just one other kid. Ever so much nicer than any room he ever saw on any tour.</p>
<p>A tour guide mentioned that you should check if a tour guide is a volunteer or not...I can't stress that enough! My school has only volunteer tour guides (we're a small school...1700 Ugrads) and while we have a lot of phenomenal ones, sometimes the tour guides are...not the best? </p>
<p>If you experience the tour from hell (which it sounds like quite a few people have), TELL SOMEONE IN ADMISSIONS! Our admissions department would love to know the performance of their tour guides, and it's extremely helpful to know who could use some extra training or guidance. </p>
<p>That said, if you find out that tour guides are volunteers, keep that in mind! I think it definitely says something about a school if they can find so many people enthusiastic enough about the school to donate their time.</p>