@Badgers21: Oh how I wish you’d just said to the UWM obsessed mom to stuff a UWMadison sock into her pie hole!
I must be getting too old or have been in too many meetings with droning people who need to zip it. I have no patience for ridiculousness like that! ugh!
We toured 18 different schools with D. Most of the tours ranged from good to very good. A few were excellent (UNC Chapel Hill and Furman for sure.) But I think that there were only two that left us feeling a little taken aback.
One of my favorite moments of any tour is when the guide tells us why they selected the school. At Elon, the guide told us that she really didn’t care where she went and that she pulled Elon out of a hat. She did feel that it had turned out OK. It was a little less moving than some other reasons we heard.
And our tour of UVA was the only tour that we all felt was just truly terrible. We can only assume that our guide was forced to lead tours as some sort of punishment. She did not seem to care for the school at all. She appeared annoyed when people asked questions, so the group as a whole gradually stopped asking. At the end she asked for questions and appeared annoyed that no one wanted to by then. D loves schools with lots of traditions and interesting history. You would think that UVA would be one of those places. Not that we could tell from our guide. There are letters painted in various places on the campus (I remember Zs, are there more?) and someone asked about them fairly early on. She told us that we’d find out later. When we got to the point where she was apparently supposed to mention them, her entire explanation was that there are secret societies on campus, but they’re secret. And why UVA? Her dad made her go. She didn’t like it at first, but she adjusted her expectations and it got better.
@dfbdfb - Just now seeing your post about Macalester and the “lot of money” information you heard on the tour. That’s fascinating, as neither my S nor I heard that at all. (I did hear it at another university here in California, though - one from which I have a grad degree, and I was mentally wondering if I should cut down my donation a bit and spend those dollars elsewhere!) In fact, I came away from Mac with a bit of the opposite impression, as their dorms were - far and away - the least upgraded and fancy of any of the schools we’ve visited. In fact, there’s one dorm that the tour guide said we wouldn’t go into - “It’s really old and has never been upgraded” - but a friend’s kid who goes there lived in it for her first year, and loved it, so we were OK with skipping that part. The “nicer” dorm we did see was a few steps below the worst we saw anywhere else, though. (Yet still nicer than the “cinderblock palace” in which I lived in the mid-80s. 
)
I’ve heard that people heard wildly different things from guides at other schools, too. The tour where I’ve got a grad degree was interesting, as I mentally caught the guide (a first year student - always risky) sorta making answers up for a few things she didn’t know. Ah well - work study jobs, I guess. Not their top priority, just something to do to make money. I don’t begrudge them that, but do a lot of independent research myself, or have the Kid do it.
Oh - and when we were at Mac (November), a parent asked if they could come back in January and tour again. The person in the admissions office was great - “Oh, no, no, no, dear. No. No. We’re not here in January. You don’t want to be here in January. Nobody is here in January.” That got the message across.
@2manybooks: Oh, agreed on the dorms! Macalester’s were easily the worst of any we’ve seen, anywhere.
Thinking about it, I kind of wonder if the session that preceded our tours preconditioned us to hear references to money and funding and endowments and such that we heard. (It also probably didn’t help that Macalester was the first high-endowment private school we toured after Trinity San Antonio, which had the most school-endowment-size-focused tour and info session you could even begin to imagine.)
When I toured Lehigh with my D, the tour guide told us about the swipe card for the dining hall and that you can add cash to it for cash purchases, but that not everyone has the extra cash added to the card. Her exact words were this:
“If your parents love you, they’ll add cash to your card for extra purchases. But if they don’t love you, like mine, you’ll use your card just for the meal plan.”
@brantly #465: @-)
Has anyone been to the Swarthmore info session? Honestly, all I remember is this strange man wearing brightly striped socks (possibly with a black suit), and that they took no questions. It was a bit surreal.
Ugh. I have a lot of family ties (a couple generations before me, but TONS then) to Lehigh. I’d sort of hoped that S would’ve at least checked it out, but he wrote it off as “too rural.” I’m not sure I could’ve bitten my tongue had I heard that, though. That would’ve likely been enough for S to write off the school, too. Oops.
After a thorough tour of Georgia Tech, the tour guide and myself stood beneath Tech Tower and tried to catch as falling leaves as possible for a solid 90 minutes.
Kind of funny end of a tour at NYU last April. Just finished the tour and the female tour guide says "thanks for comming, if you liked the tour my name is (her name)and this is NYU, if not my name is (different name) and this was Columbia.
I have been to a Swarthmore info session. There was no man with striped socks, and the two individuals presiding answered many questions. You really are dragging the bottom of the barrel now, intparent.
Ah… not sure what is “dragging the bottom of the barrel” about that description. That was our experience. It was in the spring of 2012. Maybe they have changed their format. Maybe that guy is no longer working in admissions. Maybe they do it one way on Wednesdays, and another on Thursdays. Maybe the regular people were sick and this guy filled in. If I went today with a smart phone in hand, I probably would have taken a photo because it was such an odd scene. We visited about 40 colleges overall with my kids, and probably went to info sessions at more than half of them. This one stood out (partly in a good way, as most of the questions fielded in info questions are wasted time with the answers easily available on the website). I just looked up their admissions staff, and don’t see the guy in the group photo, so assume he is no longer there.
When we toured Nebraska, it was the middle of winter and windchill of minus 11. The tour guide kept us outside as much as possible though, e.g., standing outside the library freezing while describing what is inside, rather than taking us inside for a look, etc. Finally, the tour guide took us to the middle of the football field. Apparently, that was supposed to be the shining glory of the university. My DD could care less about football, not to mention the cold wind blowing through the stadium and the long walk there and back. The rest of our trip to Lincoln, NE wasn’t much better, with drunken mobs of students everywhere at night and no students visible by day, terrible cafeteria on campus and so on. It helped my daughter decide against Nebraska, despite being offered some enticing scholarships there.
I’ve been on a lot of college tours now, with 2 kids, and most of them have been very pleasant and unremarkable.
The stand-outs happen to be two Ivies:
Yale – Super high energy, green-haired male guide whose enthusiasm for the school couldn’t help but rub off on us. He told us many personal anecdotes from his experiences at the school. I’ll always remember his answer to a question about study abroad. It went something like: “Sure there are great study abroad experiences available, but from my perspective, I have four short years to be a part of this amazing institution and I want to take advantage of every minute. I can travel abroad later.”
Princeton – Very informative about travel abroad opportunities and internship opportunities and how generous Princeton is in funding them. Otherwise spent most of the tour sharing the historical facts and legends that are otherwise available on the website. The entire tour was virtually identical to the “virtual” tour on their website. We did not enter a single building – did not see a single classroom or the library or the student center or a dorm. Left me wondering why we bothered to travel there. Felt that they were wondering the same thing (i.e., you’re not getting in here anyway; we’re just humoring you by giving you this tour).
my biggest pet peeve on tours is when we’re walking through campus and it’s just that one family who never stops talking to the tour guide for the entire tour. Like, I get that you’ve got a lot of questions, but let other people get a chance to ask, too! That’s only happened about once. All the guides I’ve had have been super spectacular, and I’ve noticed that for me, the guides are the ones who help me decide which schools to keep on my list. If they aren’t open and enthusiastic about the school, I cross it off my list.
An embarrassing moment that sticks out to me was when I was visiting my state school in the middle of January. We were just passing the medical building of campus where you go for counseling, flu shots, etc etc. As we were passing, I had the unfortunate luck of slipping on this huge ice patch and as I fell, I grabbed on to this random kid on the tour who was closest to me to keep myself from falling, but ended up dragging him down with me. So now both of us are covered in snow, he’s giving me a dirty look, and the tour guide laughs and says “good thing we were passing the med building–you’re gonna need it one day!”
Lol so embarrassing! :-S :))
@microssrunner17 If you’re bold enough, address the pet peeve. You’re only there for an hour right? Say: “excuse me, I think there are many others who have questions as well. Can you take a breath so others will be able to ask theirs?”
You can’t be so polite as to just take someone else’s rudeness. Especially for someone whom you’ll never cross again and it ruins a one-time experience for you and the other tour goers.
Santa Clara (Jesuit) tour guide who started every other sentence with “I swear.” And a UC tour guide who, when asked, didn’t know the school colors.