<p>I also think it’s perspective, being a guy, I just wanted to see the campus, look in academic buildings and see how bad the dorms were, if you asked me to remember much of anything the tour guides said, I couldn’t. Expect less, and it might help.</p>
<p>I was a “Gatesman” at Union College back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I had to go through a 2 or 3 stage interview process and give a mock tour before I was chosen. And it was purely voluntary - no one got paid to do it. It was an honor to be chosen to be a Gatesman and I loved giving the tours. Every once in awhile you got a parent who was trying their hardest to make you look foolish, but the kids were great. </p>
<p>The best was having kids come up to you in the subsequent years and say: “Hey! You were my tour guide and you’re the reason I’m here!”</p>
<p>Agree about First Impressions being hard to change no matter how hard one tries to rationalize them away.</p>
<p>On first impressions about campuses-- my guess is that Swarthmore is a supportive place to be employed. When we arrived, it was a hot day with construction blocking easy access to a convenient parking lot. A staff person in a golf cart gave us directions to the best available lot, which took us on a circuitous route. As we were parking the car, he drove up in his cart, said he noticed our out-of-state plate, & added that he didn’t want us to have a poor first impression of the campus. He then gave us a lift to admissions. During the ride, he explained why signs are lacking on campus & his concern that we might get lost. We were thoroughly impressed with him. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, the tour guide was not as impressive. At the end of the tour the group was given the option of returning to admissions to ask questions. We were close to the parking lot & walked to the car.</p>
<p>My DD is a tour guide (called student ambassadors at her school…they also work in the admissions office). The application and interview process was EXTENSIVE for these jobs which are sought be many students. DD tells me, they look for folks who do NOT view this just as a “job”. They want kids who are invested in and committed to the university. Where she is, the job can be work/study…but most of the ambassadors actually are not work study recipients. </p>
<p>I think it’s sad that the folks in charge of these tour guides don’t KNOW that some of them plan to transfer or really didn’t have this school as a top choice…or aren’t happy with the school AND feel the need to share that with prospective students.</p>
<p>DD is a tour guide at her number one school. She is actively involved in a number of student activities there ranging from sports related to the arts. She is a science major. She has lived both on and off campus. AND her hometown is 3000 miles away from the school so she has that perspective too. She loves her school. Some CC members have actually met her and had “private tour and Q/A time with her”. She is VERY happy to share the things that made her choose this school, and honestly encourage others to attend also. BUT she will answer questions honestly about things that might not be so positive (she thinks the school NEEDS a new soccer facility, for example).</p>
<p>I agree that you shouldn’t base your impressions of a school on the other people in your tour, but I also know that it does happen. D was turned off at one college because the other kids on the tour came in a group and were clearly more interested in spending the day with their friends than in getting info about the college. But somehow she picked up the same “superficial” vibe from the college’s students we saw on the tour, even though the tour guide herself was very good. So there may be a grain of truth in looking at the other kids on the tour… or you could just end up with a group that isn’t representative of the people who are admitted to that school at all.</p>
<p>Not a tour guide experience, per se, but the paid professional admissions staff can also give a good or bad impression.</p>
<p>At one school, the Assist Dean of Admissions did the info session, and he was like a cheesy used car salesman. He talked in generalities about how to apply to college, and followed every step of the process with, “It’s just that easy!” At another info session, the admissions officer talked so fast we could barely keep up, filling an hour with far more details about specific majors and programs than we could ever absorb. 10 minutes into the hour, D’s eyes glazed over.</p>
<p>At a third college, we waited for the info session in a nice auditorium with a slideshow of the college that repeated about every 4 or 5 minutes. After a while I noticed that there were pictures of kids walking across campus, playing sports, eating, in dorms… but not a single picture in a classroom. Not a single picture of a kid with safety goggles pouring something into a test tube, or of a professor pointing out something on the board. To me that said volumes about what the admissions staff expected of the kids applying to their college - that they were interested in everything BUT academics.</p>
<p>
True, though I’m pretty sure the admissions officer who talked to us at Tufts was the same one other people here on CC were so impressed with. He seemed pretentious to us. (But we liked our tour guide very much and the campus and academics were what my son is looking for, so it’s still on the list.)</p>
<p>S2 is very turned off by colleges not addressing academics. He loved that Brandeis’ admissions office had a one page flyer about every department. He hated a recent mailing by University of Md. which was all about the connections you’ll make.</p>
<p>“True, though I’m pretty sure the admissions officer who talked to us at Tufts was the same one other people here on CC were so impressed with. He seemed pretentious to us.”</p>
<p>We had a female admissions officer at Tufts who was so funny and charming. My d didn’t love the school (just not a great fit for her), but this lady almost sold her!</p>
<p>Best tour guide: Wesleyan. She was brimming with genuine enthusiasm, had a great sense of humor, a natural story-teller, and wanted to share experiences, anecdotes and insights not only from per own experience but what she had heard from students in other majors and doing different ECs. Also just a great gift for getting the students to open up and talk about their academic interests and ECs, and seemingly had a story in her back pocket for every interest. Her tour made the institution come alive in a way that that few have.</p>
<p>Worst tour guide: Bates. The tour guide was a football player who said he liked Bates because it was easy to pass his classes without studying until just before the exam. Said he often slept during one especially boring afternoon class, and didn’t worry about taking notes because he was always able to get notes and outlines from his classmates just before the exam. He made it clear that his principal and indeed his only passion was football, and he went to school because doing so allowed him to play football. Undoubtedly you’ll find these kinds of knuckleheads on almost any campus with an active sports program, but for the school to put him forward as its representative was appalling and a total turn-off for my D. Bates has become a running joke in our household; mere mention of the name unleashes peals of derisive laughter. Unfair, perhaps, but they brought it on themselves.</p>
<p>when i toured yale two springs ago, it was over 100 degrees (middle of july) and surprise surprise the tour guide didn’t bother to stop or when she did, stopped in the middle of a courtyard devoid of shade. lo and behold one girl fainted!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>When was this? Was it just a regular tour or an event day – Maine Day or the like? I’m just asking because I’m pretty sure we don’t have any football player regular daily guides, though we do have special event guides that don’t go through the same training.</p>
<p>to compound that, while we had a fantastic admissions officer who presented, at the end of his talk he added something to the effect of ‘don’t bother to apply here if you aren’t qualified because we already get enough applicants as it is.’ counterintuitive but he said it</p>
<p>Interestingly our best and worst experiences came on the same visit. When we toured UVA the “general” tour included a girl who spoke incessantly of how she belonged to a sorority even though she didn’t think she was the “type”. Also wore an extremely short sundress with cowboy boots that would have fascinated my son, had he been along. Really inappropriate. Focused almost exclusively on Commerce because she was a Commerce major and evidently they had just received a fantastic ranking somewhere. </p>
<p>We then proceeded to the E-school where two young gentlemen gave a group a fantastic tour, very informative. Well dressed, polite, explained everything to this non-engineering mom without being condescending. Knowledgeable and impressive.</p>
<p>Our most disappointing experience was at CalPoly. The admissions officer was channeling George Carlin - I’m sure he had just smoked his lunch - he kept forgetting what he was talking about and who he was talking to. The tour guide seemed to think that all the students were California residents and directed much of her commentary about admittance in-state. I kept telling DS and DH - “This is really supposed to be a good school. Really!”</p>
<p>The best guides are the ones who can adapt quickly - like the guide at Stanford who took us through a dining hall and pointed out the soft serve machine. I kiddingly asked if it was part of the tour, she talked to someone there, and we all got cones. Nice on a hot day!</p>
<p>The hardest thing for some guides was to avoid getting monopolized by one or two parents who seemed to think it was a personal tour. It’s very difficult when you’re trying to be helpful and polite.</p>
<p>sabaray, we had a similar experience at UVa (and my husband and I are both alums). The general tour was given by a girl whose clearest message was “You have to be somebody special to get in here” - all about the connections you could make, how you could have dinner with your professors, very little practical information - it was kind of like “you either get it or you don’t, and if you don’t, you’ll never get in anyway”. My introverted son didn’t respond well to all the self-aggrandizement. Then we got back to the Admissions office, and the poor deans were swarmed with everyone trying to suck up to them and impress on them how great their kids were. </p>
<p>However, the girl who gave the Engineering Department tour was professional, practical, very down-to-earth, and very helpful with the “nuts and bolts” of scheduling, research opportunities, what current projects were going on…We had to detour through a classroom so as not to disrupt a project that was going on in the hall - and then she told us all about that professor and how well-liked he was (he also greeted us warmly). My H graduated from the Engineering school at UVa and I think his school was much better represented in that small tour than in the general one.</p>
<p>And that’s MY school! I guess a lot’s changed in 30+ years!</p>
<p>Actually… our tour at the school S is going to attend was somewhat mitigated by his meeting with a coach, a student from his HS (3 years older going into senior year) who also played that sport, and a meeting with a non-athlete freshman student who was a former student of our school’s newest Dean. </p>
<p>Long story short: Had we left it up to tour guide, son would have probably passed on the collar popped, california-dude tour guide whose catch phrase was, “pretty awesome.” I even said to S that it reminded me of a drinking game! We’d have been wasted by the middle of the tour, let alone the end of it. And then… and I ALMOST wrote admissions – at the end of the tour he told of how he came to attend the school, which is a top-ranked LAC. He saw it had skiing, he was from california and loved to ski, he filled out the application on a whim and accidently hit ED instead of regular decision. He got in and basically, according to him HAD to come. Here are kids from all over the place, working their butts off and sweating over applications to what is a very competitive school. So, to hear his application was an afterthought and he mistakenly checked off early decision was pretty insulting.</p>
<p>All of this to say, if on paper or via the internet, a school seems to be a good fit, make an effort to talk to more than the tour guide while you are there. While we weren’t exactly impressed with the tour itself, everyone else was so completely wonderful that it was a slam dunk for S before we even left town.</p>
<p>Also, I always made it a point to NOT walk most of the time with S and kind of drifted to the back of the crowd. If we formed a semi-circle on a stop or something he might make mention of things, but mostly, I took the attitude that it wasn’t me going to college although I did a lot of homework via different avenues. Still, it gave him much more autonomy in the process.</p>
<p>PS. we stopped to visit Brown the summer before S’s junior year. The guide was fine, but the folks behind the desk in the admission’s office were the WORST representatives you could ever find. Basically, I asked about parking and she handed me a map and never looked up from her book she was reading. Asked about signing in or whatever and she gave an audible sigh. Truly, I have never felt so unwelcome in my entire life… anywhere.</p>
<p>im thinking about being a tour guide at clemson this fall, good or bad idea? haha</p>
<p>I was a tour guide in college. The worst tour I did was with a prospective student and his parents who did not say ONE WORD during the tour. It was just me and them and although I like to talk…</p>
<p>pierre, you can only improve on the experience we had on our tour at Clemson! Go for it.</p>
<p>(Words of advice: 1) When someone asks you where the science buildings are on campus, don’t wave your hand vaguely and say “Oh, over there somewhere, I think - I’ve never had any classes there”. 2) Don’t tell the tour group you’re a communications major and then tell them “Try to keep up, I can’t talk loud enough for those people in the back to hear”. 3) If you’re behind the desk, don’t ignore the people coming in for tours.)</p>