I agree with @TheAtlantic , let’s hear a fresh round of stories!
I was put off by a tour guide at a private school we visited (won’t name names). I hate to admit that. I know you shouldn’t go by one person.
Not a ‘bad’ kind of head-scratcher, just sort of funny to me (haven’t been in the visit mode in a while, and never to a small selective liberal LAC)…
At a Vassar visit recently (GREAT tour guide…dad is prof and all 3 siblings Vassar students/grads) we learned in the library that there is a “meditation” room upstairs; no books allowed. Good to know.
With ONE exception, every tour guide we had was the same girl - some form of humanities major that apparently must be minoring in Auctioneering. Rapid fire speech the entire tour, with every few sentences punctuated with the phrase “and it’s SO Great!!” For some odd reason, every one of them talked about their hair or clothes.
We had one male tour guide who was an engineering student that happened to speak clearly and pause to breathe now and then. My son still has that college on the top of his list, even though he says he knows it isn’t fair to judge a college based on the tour guide.
One of our guides gathered the group in an area of the quad that smelled really, really bad. This is where we paused for discussion and questions. My S wanted to ask, “how is everyone managing to ignore that it smells like butt here?”
@WhataProcess Is incense or other forms of aromatherapy allowed in the meditation room?
I’ll have to ask next time.
We were touring a campus with a reputation for attracting wealthy students. Since we are clinging to our middle-class status by our bruised and bleeding fingertips, we felt ill at ease until the guide, nice as could be, repeated the university’s goal to break away from that stereotype. Relaxing a bit, we commented on how the program’s design must help strengthen relationships, and she said, “Oh sure, most [students] even hang out in the Hamptons together.” Um, yeah.
We toured the campus of a school whose full name is 10 syllables in length. The tour guide, a young man who was polished and engaging but not phony, pronounced all 10 syllables every single time.
I started watching for him to use the 3-letter abbreviation just once during the 90-minute tour. Nope! Great student ambassador training and nicely executed.
OV16, I give up. I tried a few schools, like MIT, and they were all more than 10 syllables.
Oklahoma state university?
Or The Ohio State University
Western Kentucky University (WKU or “Western”)
That would have been even more impressive as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for sure!
Those tour guides are surely trained to use the “the”!
@jack6450 what school? If you feel comfortable saying
Has to be “THE Ohio Stste University”. They are so proud of that “The”, it is sort of cute…
Love this thread.
The most jaw-dropping moments for us were early in the search when the kid wanted to check out some tippy-top schools that are no longer on the list. In several of those info sessions, I was struck (and depressed) by how tightly wound some of the students and parents were. (Not all, of course – not trying to make any sweeping generalizations.) There were all sorts of anxious and extremely specific questions about whether it was “better” to do this or that or the other minimally significant thing to raise the chances of getting in, which the presenters responded to with considerable patience. I wanted to gather them all up and send them on a nice relaxing spa vacation.
Worst info session ever was UMass Amherst. I think it was a solid hour of droning on about admissions requirements (down to specific GPA expectations for each school). Almost nothing about what made the school uniquely appealing. Followed by an otherwise perfectly fine tour with an enthusiastic guide who pronounced everything “awesome” – a word that should be banned from tour guide vocabulary on the grounds of overuse.
I was on a tour with D13 where the tour guide would begin every other sentence withe the phrase “that being said” about half way through the tour I begin mentally predicting when the phrase would be used and was right all but twice. It was used 14 times in the last half of the tour.
Re 10-syllable college - I thought Carnegie Mellon University?
It was Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, KY. a.k.a. WKU or “Western”
Carnegie Mellon fits too, as does The Ohio State.
With University being 5 syllables, all of D’s candidate colleges are 7-10 syllables - more if you add the name of the campus, like Indiana University Bloomington.