@georgiaonmymind OMG I couldn’t deal.
May of 2014 my daughter and I had an awesome tour at Tufts! Funny fact about our MIT tour - they offer a summer course on how to date young ladies.
We traveled 2000 miles to see a couple of “top tier” schools… At one particular school, the info session was fine, but then they brought out the student tour guides. Each introduced themselves so my daughter could choose which guide had similar interests / majors / clubs. This is the same at most schools we have visited. However, all 8 - 10 students where either science, math or business majors. My DD is a total LA kid and would have been happy with an English, History, Philosophy, Languages student. When I approached the admissions officer to let her know we were disappointed, she said she is never sure who she’ll get on any particular day. Totally turned my DD off to that school! 
I don’t think we were asking for much, but a more diverse group of students tour guides. It was definitely a bummer.
@phoenixmomof2 I am wondering if she means what tour guides she will get on a specific day, or if she means what type of prospective students she will get. I understand the students part, where some days there will be a class during the tour times, and they will have limited LA tour guides. The reasoning of what prospectives will show up does not make as much sense because you said there were plenty for the other majors.
@mxl2015 I don’t know the exact wording she used, but she was referring to her student guides. She didn’t know what student guides would be available each day. Seems they could do a bit better job with scheduling.
My oldest likes to play “Spot the communications majors!” when we’ve been at schools with multiple tour guides. (She’s nearly always right.)
At accepted students weekend at CMU, my son and I were assigned a tour guide from business school. Was there no one available from CS?
@dfbdfb "My oldest likes to play “Spot the communications majors!”
Can you be more specific? What do they look like? For entertainment purposes only. 
@Much2learn: I had to ask her, and she wasn’t terribly specific. They’re incredibly perky, she said, and very “physically together”, and usually have bubbly voices, according to her.
So, not males?
Might be easier to tailor the tour at a big school. Our Big State U offers tours of particular departments. But they have a a huge pool of people to draw from.
They would be the guys wearing dickies.
“It often smells like fresh cow manure in Madison, WI - and not just in springtime!”
That is news to me. Oscar Meyer in the old days–yes. But cow? Only in/near the dairy barn.
We toured a PA school in early March when the area had a cold snap accompanied by whipping winds. With the wind chill it was sub zero. The tour guide was great, with one exception. He kept stopping in front of buildings to give us the spiel on what was inside. Undoubtedly he had been trained to do this in order to prevent tour crowding, but as we were the only tour in sight it didn’t make any difference and we were in danger of developing frostbite standing outside in the wind. One of the parents finally requested that we run from building to building and do all the talking indoors. Even more strange, the guide was walking around in just a heavy sweatshirt. We’re from New England and both my kids ended up at Maine schools, so we’re used to the cold, but this tour was COLD.
Typically the tour guides for summer visits were from less employable majors. Those in employable majors had actual jobs during the summer. Sometimes we would meet STEM students who were working elsewhere (usually doing research) on campus, but the ones working as tour guides were more humanities or social science majors.
At the end of a tour at Oregon State, the guide said, “You guys are really lucky, this is the first time this year we’ve had 3 straight days of sunshine!” After he left, many of the kids in tour - who seemed to be mostly from SoCal - turned to each other and basically said, “OK, scratch this one!”
Not a “moment,” necessarily, but when we went to the fall open house at RIT with our D, the student tour guide for the animation program was Chinese, spoke in a whisper, barely spoke English, and could not answer a single question about the program. Definitely a head scratcher and a huge turnoff.
RISD scheduled an open house in late August. Perfect, I thought, the students will be there but our D’s high school has not started yet. So I signed up, took Friday off, and drove the 4.5 hours with D. After a very good hour-long information session the tours began. It quickly became clear that no students were there. Finally someone asked our student guide and she said, oh yes, classes don’t start here until next week. The only buildings we were able to see were the first-year studios and the library. The cafeteria was closed for renovations, the dorms were also closed and all of the individual program buildings were too. What a waste of a day!
When I toured JMU’s music school with my S in 2011, at the end of the info session he asked the dean about opportunities for aspiring film composers. The dean snapped, “if you want to be a film scorer, go to UCLA.” Okay then.
Too funny, @honestmom We toured RIT with both our sons, both are deaf. We were interested in National Technical Institute for the Deaf, which is one of the RIT schools. Our tour guide was a lovely young man who was deaf. He only signed - both our boys are oral-only (they hear and speak thanks to cochlear implants). We had to ask for an interpreter for the tour guide. RIT wasn’t the right place for either boy for other reasons - and they have amazing accommodations - but the tour was really awkward.
@IJustDrive. The tour guide thing is not true at my daughters school. The STEM kids often do ORGO in the summer after freshman year and act as tour guides.
@Trisherella, nope, guys can be perky, too!
Related to communications majors, when we toured Trinity in San Antonio, our communications-major/theater-minor tour guide took us on a very through tour of their broadcast TV and fine arts facilities, but when asked about what they have for life sciences she basically waved her arm in a nonspecific direction and said “Their building’s over there.” (The guy who led the info session afterward, on the other hand, may have had too much of a focus on the sciences. There’s a balance to strike here, folks.)