<p>One of our pet peeves were when Tour Guides would repeat several elements from the General Info Session. Time with prospective students is limited- why give the same info?! D said the Tour Guides should sit in on an info session.</p>
<p>At UChicago, several families would walk sooo sloooowly and/or stop and take photos. Our poor Tour Guide had to stop and wait for them to catch up. After a few occasions of awkward silence, other group members used the opportunity to ask questions.</p>
<p>Finally, we ate in several dining halls this week. During the summer many institutions host programs for young students. It must to be a different atmosphere without 40 9 year olds scurrying about a cafeteria!</p>
<p>RE: Harvard. Some percentage of people on Harvard tours are just tourists. The campus has lots of history, I toured it with a guidebook but kept bumping into large campus tour groups! I kept wondering what % were actually interested in applying to colleges at all. With the volume of visitors they get, I can see why they donât want to take them into the dining hall!</p>
<p>Are you really not going to apply to Harvard because the dining hall is ugly? They do open the campus to accepted students so a better plan might be to apply and then do the visit if accepted.</p>
<p>There is a comment above about how Harvard stopped taking tour groups through one of their more ornate buildings because it disrupted the students. That reminds me of the tour I took of the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. The main thing I wanted to see was the grand main reading room. However, they didnât want tourists disrupting the people researching. Therefore, they took you up steps and had you look through a glass window at the grand room. Disappointment.</p>
<p>@BeanTownGirl: I go to that tech school down the road, but take a class at Harvard, and it always seemed to me that the tourist groups and student/parent groups were sharply separated. I mean, itâs hard to be sure, but it never looks like Iâm seeing tourists on the actual campus tours. They seem to be doing separate tourist tours. Same story at my school and at a couple other hot schools for tourists that Iâve visited.</p>
<p>There are a bunch of different Harvard tours. Tour guides from all over the world (foreign language, microphones, country flags), night time tours, historical tours. The company most students become guides through isnât affiliated with the university admissions office (Hahvahd tours). The tour groups are so huge that you really canât tell. Prospective families might be on any number of the different kinds of tours.</p>
<p>They do try to keep them separate, but thereâs overlap, and itâs a struggle to keep up with the crowds. Lots of commercial tour operators bring their groups onto campus, and the university chooses not to exclude them, so theyâre around all the time too.</p>
<p>âAre you really not going to apply to Harvard because the dining hall is ugly?â</p>
<p>I met LOTS of families as a tour guide where the parents wanted to be there and the kid didnât. We took that as a challenge! Sometimes a great tour could turn things around so that the kid said at the end, âI didnât want to come today, but now I think Iâll apply.â</p>
<p>At orientation, I watched a family in front of us. Their D was in line with them for an evening meal which was meant solely for parents and siblings. Students were eating in another area. Their D was fretfully showing them the itinerary and telling them that she was supposed to be elsewhere on the campus. They asked her to just stay with them, but she finally convinced them that the staff would separate them when they would arrive at the front of the line. They looked dismayed, tearful, upset, frightenedâŠIt left me wondering how they would cope in a few weeks.</p>
<p>That Harvard dining hall is certainly nicer than the one I remember from undergrad we usually ate at. There were windows separating it from the indoor pool from the gym. Youâd be sitting there eating a bacon cheeseburger with fries and suddenly a fat dude wearing a speedo would be standing there in front of you. :(</p>
<p>We toured Tulane on a Friday afternoon, when a lot of the kids were already well into the party mode. As our tour walked past a dorm building (which had room doors opening directly onto the sidewalk) a door just in front of our tour group leader burst open, loud music and a cloud of smoke poured out along with a very drunk student who threw up on the sidewalk right in front of us. Tulane definitely lived up to its party-school reputation that day!</p>
Visiting this thread a whole year and a half later still makes me laugh! Only now Iâm taking all of your stories into consideration as I just got a job as a tour guide!
I was on tour at a Canadian college (Wilfrid Laurier) and a parent was horrified that there wasnât air conditioning. Between September-May, youâve got about, what, 6 weeks, at best, of weather that might make AC beneficial?
When we toured WPI, the guide said that the male:female ratio was 75:25 (it was 83:17 when my daughter attended), but you donât really notice because at least 1/3rd of the male population was in their room playing World of Warcraft.
D and I were touring an ivy when the guide stopped us in front of a building, waxed poetic about the architecture a bit, then asked us all to guess when it was built. D looked at me and said, this must be a trick question, and pointed to a plaque near the door. There, for all to see, was the date⊠In roman numerals. We just kept quiet and giggled a bit. Itâs still her top reach choice, even if the tour guide didnât recognize roman numerals.
And another⊠The presenter at at school asked how far people had traveled. One family said France, another said Turkey. The presenter said, well I donât know which is furtherâŠ
Presenter was an alum who had majored in European History.
@irishmomof2 I donât know how hot it gets in canda but at my school I didnât get AC and it was hard. Muggy/hot NY weather didnât cool down until near the end of October last year. I remember walking around campus drenched. And it for really hot around April again so I understand the dismay lol.
At large public university tour (Mom: âWhat time do the girls have to be out of the boys rooms at night?â Guide:Um, well thatâs up to the girls. Mom" What? I mean what time is curfew?" Guide"There is no curfew" Kid: âI TOLD you mom.â Mom: âOh. My. God.â
@maya54 I volunteer to give tours during open house. This past semester I led one and the semester before my room was the show room- and you would not believe how often that comes up.
I even had one mom ask, and I kid you not, âDo the boy try to sneak into the bathroom to lookâ
I think the tour guide did a great job answering lol " Well, no, the boys have their own bathrooms and if a boy were to do that they would get in trouble and obviously someone would kick them out of the bathroom" to which the mom replied âwhat about their roomsâ and the tour guide said, âMiss, I can assure you that if thereâs any boy in the room chances are he did not sneak inâ
The mother could not find where to put her face!
As a tour guide, I think a lot of parents forget that we are students first. Yes we are here to sell the school,but know it takes some practice to not give you a âreally?â Look when questions about boys v girls come up lol
In this building, and in all of them, we have swipe systems and there has NEVER been a break into a room.
![http://www.dining.harvard.edu/images/residential/img_dah_annenberg.jpg[/url]](http://www.dining.harvard.edu/images/residential/img_dah_annenberg.jpg%5B/url%5D){kind=link}
