Moments that make you scratch your head during tours

<p>Tmi NewJersey17 ;)</p>

<p>Best tours
BU
MIT
Yale
Princeton</p>

<p>Mediocre
BC
UVa
GWU</p>

<p>Worst
Tufts
Holy Cross
Dartmouth
Harvard
Columbia
UPenn</p>

<p>One of the worst tours-
Tufts was a great info session followed by a guy who told us all about how bad things were
How the library was too noisy. How housing messed up the soph placements. How the school didn’t have enough licenses for the engineering programming on the computers
etc etc
He complained so much. Looked like he rolled out of bed. Most of the group left him before he was halfway through! K1 said that no way was Tufts staying on the list
</p>

<p>I actually appreciate it when the guide is being honest. The tour shouldn’t be a sales pitch. Of course, if the guide had one of those negative personalities, that’s another thing.</p>

<p>Our tour guide at Yale had apparently unwisely drunk too much coffee before his tour and had to stop half way through and duck into a nearby dorm to pee.</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>As a recent college grad, those would have been my exact same (completely honest) answers if someone had asked me those questions about my school. I was put in a triple, and it was fine. I had nothing in common with my roommates, and it was fine. My college wasn’t exactly representative of the population, and I never really noticed. Sometimes, the things that would bother you aren’t what bother other people, or the things that sound really bad turn out to be fine when you actually experience them. That could have very well been her exact opinion about it.</p>

<p>Very true. And this could be exactly what she thought. </p>

<p>But still it often feels like you are being told the company line.</p>

<p>@redpoint the tour guides are actually pretty calm about the question. They normally brig up the blue light system and talk about any resources the school has for victims. I agree it’s a question that needs to be brought up! I think it should be part of the required information given!</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>yay! it is actually pretty competitive to become a tour guide at W&M. They take maybe 1/4 of the applicants
 and they are not paid.</p>

<p>Sometimes the things tour guides wear are curious. We went to Lawrence in WI on one of the coldest days of the year, icy sidewalks, snow etc. The wind chill was well below zero but we were prepared with boots, down, hats and gloves. Our sweet tour guide was from Africa. Although she was a sophomore she was dressed in skimpy Keds tennis shoes, a sweater, no hat or gloves. I so wanted to buy her a parka. It was freezing. I can understand not being prepared your first year but after that
 </p>

<p>On the Harvard tour, one of the dads took it upon himself to be Mr. Funny Man and ask all of the questions and make jokes while his poor daughter looked like she wanted to die. One couple without a student sat in the very front row of the info session and asked several questions which seemed strange, sort of like they were vetting colleges for their child who was much too busy finding a cure for cancer than to be bothered to visit colleges. </p>

<p>At the MIT info. session, one of the kids in the crowded lecture hall said he “was nationally and internationally ranked in a sport, but if he was not going to participate in it during college” should he still mention it on his application? I about died.</p>

<p>Hands down worst tour: Cornell. Must have been 80 people in our group. Tour guide didn’t bother facing us when she spoke, didn’t care if we could hear or not. Felt like cattle being driven to market.</p>

<p>Vibe we got was, “Hey, we’re Cornell, we’ll treat you like crap and you’ll still give do anything to get accepted here”. We all couldn’t wait to get away from that place.</p>

<p>I don’t like having to sit through questions that are easily answered online. If people would bother to do a little research prior to touring a college they could get a lot of their questions answered before they step foot on campus and save the Q&A time for other questions. An example is asking questions about merit scholarships when the criteria (GPA/test scores) are listed online. What isn’t stated online is that whatever GPA is sent to the school is the GPA that is used–they don’t unweight the GPAs or consider course rigor. So . . . a student from a school that doesn’t weight grades is at a disadvantage when it comes to merit scholarships.</p>

<p>Most embarrasing moments for me and my daughter when touring colleges with husband/dad: A slide show plays while waiting for a tour to start at American University. One slide indicated 48 states were represented at the university. As we were waiting, we were chatting with an admissions rep and my husband asked which two states were not represented. The guy was unable to answer the question and that bothered my husband even though the answer has no bearing on whether our daughter would want to attend AU. After that, we were hoping he wouldn’t ask any other questions. At George Washington University, he asked a question that was easily answered online (I don’t remember what it was) :(. Unfortunately, he didn’t do any college research so he ended up being one of those annoying people who ask questions that can be answered online.</p>

<p>One of the funniest moments was a tour at the University of Portland and there was a woman on the tour who was not paying any attention to what was going on. She was on her cell phone most of the time. At one point in time, while talking on her cell phone, she ran into a door that was open. She promptly put her phone away and while I don’t think she started paying attention to the tour guide, she at least started to watch where she was going to avoid hitting anything else.</p>

<p>MSNDIS: Yes! Why oh why don’t they answer the GPA weighting question on their websites!?</p>

<p>We toured CalPoly SLO several years ago. The first part was the presentation in an auditorium. The mid40’s guy running it was about 15 minutes late, and when he arrived it seemed like he had smoked his lunch. Or he was channeling George Carlin the Hippy Dippy Weatherman. He lost his train of thought several times; at one point he turned to a parent and asked what he (the presenter) had been talking about.</p>

<p>The tour guide knew nothing of the technical aspects of the school (we were interested in comp sci). She also assumed everyone was from California (we were not) and talked a LOT about admission requirements for state residents.</p>

<p>Two school representatives, two strikes, no application.</p>

<p>In response to a previous comment, I was an one open house of a selective university where they showed a map of all of the home states of their students. The one white area was North Dakota. The admissions director said to the crowd - if any of you are from North Dakota, this is your chance.</p>

<p>Maybe you all have heard of this one being done before?</p>

<p>The admissions head at College of Wooster had a big crowd. I was sitting in the second row, middle. No one was sitting in front of me. He started out by saying how sorry he was nobody was brave enough to sit in the front row center seat because if they had . . and he pulls an envelope out from under the seat, they would have been entitled to four years free tuition.</p>

<p>We were visiting my alma mater, where the College of Engineering has grown considerably since I was in school. During the tour, our guide pointed to the original Engineering building and said, “The rumor is that originally, students called this building Old Red, but no one has used that name for a long time.”</p>

<p>I felt very old as I recalled the name of building as Old Red.</p>

<p>When my DD1 and I were touring Georgetown, there was one over-bearing mom in our group who just could not stop asking questions and interjecting little anecdotes about herself. “Oh that’s interesting, but back when I was in college
” Her son did not say a word and just hung his head. You could tell he was totally embarrassed. And she was oblivious to the rest of the group looking at each other and rolling our eyes. You could tell that the tour guide was getting a little frustrated, but to his credit he kept his poise, politely answered every question, and finished the tour without throttling her. (I’m sure many of you have had this “same person” on your tours as well - hopefully it was not you!) </p>

<p>The tour guide was really good by the way. He was a senior and talked a lot about religious diversity on campus and his personal experience being a Muslim at a Jesuit university. As an atheist, I have to admit that I went into the tour with a negative, anti-Catholic bias, but he really helped turn me around to the point that I now enthusiastically support DD1 applying there.</p>

<p>On a tour of UVa last summer with S13, the tour guide could not stop talking about secret societies. He would pass a building and say, “Well, if I could talk about secret societies, I could tell you about that building.” When he walked over some mysterious markings on the ground, he said, “I’d like to tell you about those markings, but they are part of the secret societies.” After saying something like this six or seven times, he said “I’d like to tell you more about secret societies, but” Without missing a beat, a younger sibling (I’d guess age 10) from another family said, “But then we’d all have to kill you.” Everyone laughed, and the tour guide blushed and didn’t say another word about secret societies for the rest of the tour.</p>

<p>When we toured the U of R, there was an Asian family whose child was eleven. No, he didn’t know what he wanted to major in. He was eleven. I think he might have preferred to go to Disney or something rather than spending his summer vacation visiting colleges (and no, he wasn’t a genius who was planning on enrolling at the age of twelve or anything).</p>