Also the paint-something-camp-overnight-to-defend-it tradition. At one school it was a concrete fence, at another a statue, etc etc. And the visiting-puppies-for-finals therapy.
For my personal bingo sheet: Quidditch, LEED-certified science building, library quiet floors, students walking professorsâ dogs or babysitting their kids as examples of how accessible they are, and weird traditions about donât touch/walk through/look at X or you wonât graduate. Also use of the word âawesome.â
I should have said graduated library quiet floors or something like that ⊠maybe the next copier / paster who has something new to add will fix
People who rock climb in high school often want to continue it in college; frequently, climbing gyms are so expensive that the only option is to work there. On-campus climbing walls are much cheaper and easier to access.
Harvey Mudd has âwartsâ on all their buildings. It was mentioned that it is a bad idea to climb the warts, because some are only glued on, but kids do it anyway.
@awesomepolyglot: I donât have anything AGAINST climbing walls, I just think itâs odd how so many schools use them as a centerpiece of their tours.
I feel left out! I have probably seen about 40 schools between both of my kids and have never seen any climbing walls. We were told at one school that it is customary to run naked in the quad at midnight during finals.
Re: Parallel tours
Never came across that, but Yale did have a student only session (ran by students) so kids could talk freely.
Re: This thread in general - loving it so entertainingâŠI wish I could think of a great story to add. Instead Iâll add this:
I have to say the best tour we experienced as at Harvey Mudd. We went into labs, classrooms, even a dorm, spoke to students working on projects, even professors in the hallways would stop and introduce themselves and tell us a little about their class or the school. I was so impressed and surprised! (Seemed like most tours barely ever entered a building which was often my âhead scratchingâ momentâŠand we certainly didnât get to chat with professors!). To be fair, though, Mudd is a very small school so this is much easier than a large campus would be.
Re: BingoâŠHereâs my contribution
-Our food is the best!
-you can take classes at ________________
-"⊠and you can create your major."
-tunnels or other underground âsecretâ areas that students donât enter âwink winkâ.
-swim test/swim requirement started because of donation of sizable sum in the early 20th c. by bereft parents whose child attended said university and later drowned as a young adult (double bonus points if the tour guide says that the drowning occurred when the Titanic sank)
-fun,quirky tradition of letting out a collective primal scream at midnight the night before finals start
-paint something then camp overnight to defend it tradition
-visiting-puppies-for-finals therapy
-Quidditch
-LEED-certified science building
-graduated library quiet floors
-students walking professorsâ dogs or babysitting their kids as examples of how accessible they are
-weird traditions about donât touch/walk through/look at X or you wonât graduate
-use of the word âawesome.â
Every school my son and I visited (on both coasts) always mentioned that one student who got an internship at Google.
Itâs hard to say what draws a kid to a school, but DS was quite taken by the session that had no AOs, no parents, etc. I think it solidified his intentions.
Hey⊠regarding those tunnels, my kid was taken into some right near her campus over the summer last year by a staff member of her college â with a rope ladder & grappling hook/rope to get down and up. 
Not sure kid was supposed to tell me⊠and donât remember hearing about it on the tour!
Not a tour but the identical introductory slide show with pretty landscapes, photos of chem labs, good looking and young instructors, and student social groups that often preceded itâŠAll slides with students seemed to show the same 3 or 4 smiling students: 1 white, 1 African American, 1 of Asian ancestry, and sometimes 1 of Latino descent (judging by looks only, obviously, but thatâs the point). That slide show at small liberal arts colleges was so predictable!
Fascinatingâbecause we had the opposite reaction. When we toured Macalester, but of my daughters and I came off our parallel tours a bit disturbed by the vibe we got, which was basically, âMacalester has a lot of money, and because we have a lot of money we have really good AAA services. And the fact that we have a lot of money also means that we can provide YYY to our students. And we have an excellent ZZZ center, because we have a lot of money. By the way, did we mention that we have a lot of money?â
It didnât knock Macalester off my oldestâs shortlist, but it certainly did bump them down a few slots.
And an amen! to the Quidditch. Weâve toured 17 schools so far, and at 14(!) of them, the tour guide has said something along the lines of âWe have clubs for everything! They range from normal ones like QQQ to really unique ones, like Quidditch Club.â
Unique? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
p.s. Squirrel-Watching Club, too. Not quite as on-every-campus, but similarly not unique to yours.
- And if we don't have a club you want, you can start one!
- One Cards - you use them for the dining center, bookstore, cafe/coffeeshop, library, access to dorms and academic buildings, laundry. Bonus points for the clueless tour guide who mentions it is all "free" (meaning Bank of Mom & Dad is paying for it and student is clueless about the charges showing up on their bill).
^ we got an albino squirrel story more than once.
A story from the other side of the tour. I was a tour guide a McGill University n Montreal where temperatures are in Celsius. One day in January I was leading a tour and the temperature was a balmy 20 degrees Fahrenheit. A shivering parent from a warmer clime asked me what was the coldest day I had experienced in Montreal. I told her that I had learned the hard way that -40 Fahrenheit equals -40 Celsius. I think she left the tour to get a hot chocolate.
*For the bingo game, you get a FREE SPACE when a mom on the tour is shocked and appalled at coed bathrooms (even though they existed when I went to college 35 years ago) and embarrasses her child by commenting loudly about her personal thoughts on the matter.
*Explaining in detail the Blue Light system.
@doschicos Yes yes and yes! Youâve remembered all the ones I forgot! (That or you went on all the same tours.)
@dfbdfb Youâve described our experience of info session of a certain institution in Cambridge a few people have heard of. Pretty much WE HAVE BUCKETS OF MONEY AND ACCESS AND CAN DO ANYTHING WE WANT. (We left before the tour. Not that kid was a candidate anyway, but still.)