I went to Penn for grad schools and one of my kids says the same. She also calls it too dirty. It breaks my heart because I think the campus is gorgeous and its size as the biggest Ivy is a real selling point.
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I guess “dirty” is relative, depending on where you live / where the kids grew up. Some say “dirty” others say “real,” you’ve got to know your (or your kid’s comfort level). My kid doesn’t like the suburbs, says too boring, too vanilla. To each his own. I was just wondering what the “smell” meant, as SF has tons of, what we call, “city smells”, which we believe are charming.
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I will say I think the Philadelphia suburbs are fantastic. I loved the area of Haverford and Villanova. SJU is interesting, one side is a movie set and on the other side has a lot of crime.
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Interesting and I don’t know if this is appropriate for the original or spin off thread, but I hear more complaints about tour guides and sizes of tours. What I wonder is, with the huge increase in apps, are more students trying to visit campuses? Schools are scrambling to find tour guides and they are packing the info sessions/tours like sardines. Many families are making significant travel plans to visit these schools, and to have an uninformed tour guide, a too-crowded group and an intern at the podium
is really discouraging.
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I agree with this! The schools that had horrible tours made it much more difficult to figure out if it was a good fit or not. D also hated when tours skipped academic buildings/labs/maker spaces.
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People want to see the inside of buildings. Schools need to recognize that walking through the dining rooms, the library, academic buildings, and heaven forbid a dorm is important for families. On the last tour we went on with a student with a language barrier. We walked past every building except for one - that one she took us to the basement where we faced a wall and gave a speech about dorms. She didn’t understand some of the mom questions about girls and boys in the same dorm and kept repeating “that is a great question” or “wow, thanks for bringing that up” like a script from a how-to-give-a tour video yet didn’t have any concrete answers.
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I actually almost just spit out me tea on the faced a wall in the basement and she gave a speech comment. Been there, done that! We appreciated the schools that at least had a sample dorm room to walk through.
Even though we toured 6 years ago now, I still remember some of my pet peeves:
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Getting to see a law library instead of the actual library where most undergrads study because the law library was prettier ; )
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Not seeing the inside of anything academic…nothing at all…and when asked, being told that it wasn’t important. (This was pre covid too so IMO, no excuse).
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Having the visitors parking adjacent to where there were known groups of people using drugs and drinking. (Not a good look for a first impression).
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Having the tour guide hyper focused on only one major when the 25 students on the tour introduced themselves and their intended major and less than 10% aligned with the guide’s focus.
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Tour guides who were clearly new, not well trained, and couldn’t answer even basic questions. Made it feel like admissions didn’t care very much.
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Schools with super limited visit days/hours and that don’t publish their signups in advance.
The schools with awesome tours really stood out in the face of some of these others!
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I’ll say this again - the best tour, hands down, that we went on was Discover WVU Days. (pre-covid) … Honestly, if you’re anywhere nearby and have a free day just to explore a college, it’s a great tour. (And they did NOT take us to the football stadium, though our bus driver did point it out from the hill, as opposed to UF, which began and ended with football, and FSU, which played the bloody tomahawk chop fight dirge from loudspeakers throughout. Ugh.)
We’ve gone on formal tours of: UF, FSU, Princeton, Ohio U., Otterbein, Pitt, Temple, Bloomsburg, Slippery Rock, Brown, St. Joe’s, West Chester, Stockton, Sewanee, Oglethorpe, CWRU, Cleveland State, Drew and Elizabethtown. WVU beat every one of them for organization, depth & detail of tours, and eagerness to please/being so welcoming.
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It is so interesting how each tour seems to be different although they are supposed to be the same. Someone posted on the other thread about how terrible the Williams tour was but ours was great, we saw inside multiple buildings and the student was fabulous, and this was during the summer.
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My sister went to Wharton in the late 1970s, and West Philly was still a bit of a war zone then. She regales us with stories of police chasing a suspect up her fire escape while she was reading in bed.
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Totally agree w/you about how annoying it is when the tour just stops outside a building instead of going inside.
Last summer, my daughter and I went on a campus tour of ASU. Tour guide walked so fast, we had to speed walk in order to keep up with her. Like, that tour guide seriously hustled! Hardly went into any buildings. The formula was:
- speed walk to next location
- speed talk very quickly about some facts about building
- speed ask everybody “any questions?”
- speed say “Ok, moving on”
- then speed walk to next location
The whole thing ended up leaving my daughter with a bad taste in her mouth.
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Yes! That is annoying. I do remember on one tour we didn’t go inside the building, but the building was being renovated…so in that case it was for good reason.
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Would you want 25 or so strangers walking through your home several times day?
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Vanderbilt had a fake room for everyone to see in one of the freshman dorms. It was kinda hilarious
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Northeastern tour guides, or Ambassadors as they are called. are paid and undergo extensive training. Not all visitors get a welcome like this though:
Northeastern University Flashmob - Husky Ambassadors - YouTube
Hard to believe this was 9 years ago!
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3 of the tours we’ve been on have had a similar set up.
If I lived in a dorm, I wouldn’t want people coming through. I do know that at some schools in the summer, they’ll show you a dorm. At D’s school they would send out an email asking if students would be willing to have their dorm used for tours…
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i went to wharton for grad school i cant imagine being an undergrad at Upenn/philly - and despite my impressions - there were plenty of penn graduates in my wharton MBA class!! but i would say no to my kids for philly
and i lived off campus so not even like i had to endure west philly!
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It depends on the student. Back in the stone ages in the 90s when I was in college, my dorm room was on the 1st floor and tours regularly walked down our hall. My roommate and I purposely left our door open whenever 1 of us was in the room and we didn’t want/need privacy at the time because: (a) we wanted our friends to stop by and say hi; and (2) we knew that tours would come through about once a day and we remembered what it was like just the year before as HS seniors trying to figure out what dorm life would be like.
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We’ve been to a few schools with the staged dorm room, too. My favorite dorm tour was at Smith (this was Feb 2020 so pre-Covid) where our guide took us to her dorm and showed us her room. It helped that my daughter and I were the only ones on the tour, but it was still such a nice gesture.
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