tour guide experiences

<p>^ grapejuine (post #51),
The football player tour guide at Bates was last year, in July 2008—no special day, just a regular summer weekday. He seemed to be a regular tour guide; the admissions staff were on a first name basis with him and divided up the group between him and one other tour guide. It could very well be that he’s no longer doing it. For Bates’s sake, I hope so.</p>

<p>haha alright well i’ll try not to do any of the “bad/negative” things that have been listed here</p>

<p>bclintock</p>

<p>He was probably a summer guide. Summer tours are more difficult because they’re usually much bigger. There’s also a smaller pool of people willing to do tours in the summer, since not as many people will be/want to be in Lewiston for the summer.</p>

<p>Anyway, I’m sorry your family had a bad experience at Bates – we do work very hard on our tour guide program and are actually recognized for it fairly often, but I’m sure Hampshire isn’t deserving of the peals of laughter it gets from my family when it’s mentioned – one bad tour can definitely color an experience.</p>

<p>geez, pressure much?</p>

<p>i mean, for one, tour guides might be new. i know on my first tour i got a group of fifteen people and by the end of the tour there were two people left. they didn’t give us a script or anything, and it didn’t help that their only way of training us was asking us to go on two tours ourselves. if you haven’t done it before it is really damn hard to come up with enough stories to fill an hour. and even after that, if you’re having a bad day or get a crowd that doesn’t ask questions, it’s really easy to slip up.</p>

<p>i strongly encourage you to do more research about the schools you visit. maybe go on a second tour if the first one sucks. i have given my fair share of crappy tours (despite really loving my school and really loving my job as a tour guide), and it would be a shame if you were turned off to a school just because of one little thing your tour guide did. your tour guide’s performance really has a lot more to do with the tour guide than the quality of the school.</p>

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<p>This is the most difficult part for me. I build in time for my tour to ask questions – aside from asking if anyone has any questions often, I also let people interrupt and ask. So my tour, without questions, only takes 45 minutes as opposed to the 1:15 it should. It’s not that I don’t have enough stories, it’s that I want to be sure that we can cover all the information and have time for any questions/extra stops we need to have.</p>

<p>It’s your (or your child’s!) life for the next four years – hopefully you have a couple questions!</p>

<p>This is an oldie-but-goodie with some things it might be helpful to ask a guide.
[Education:</a> What That College Tour Guide Really Means - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/articles/070815/15tourguide.htm]Education:”>http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/articles/070815/15tourguide.htm)</p>

<p>Also difficult for me – I don’t mind if you leave, I know a lot of people have to meet with a coach/professor, want to explore the campus on their own, don’t like listening to me, whatever. It’s fine I don’t mind – but if it’s a small enough tour that I’d notice, tell me you’re going! Otherwise I worry that I lost someone along the route, which is never a good feeling.</p>

<p>We were touring a schools that costs 50K+ per year (oh, what the heck, it was an Ivy) and during the info session they had proudly highlighted the numerous activities outside of the classroom for students to participate in. During the tour, our very nice guide gestured towards the train station on campus and said, “There is not a lot to do here on the weekends, so most people just head into city A or city B.”</p>

<p>tiredofsnow, I forgot the part where the first guide announced that since she wasn’t paid by the University, she could say whatever she wanted! I thought to myself that they should have paid her! </p>

<p>Anyway, the E-school guides won us over and D will be a proud Wahoo in a few short weeks. And I’ll be the proud mom who understands nothing about engineering!</p>

<p>I went on a tour of the University of Virginia in April since my dad had a conference there so I went for fun
My tour guide gave his first tour ever to us and his buddies were also in our group asking him random questions to see if he could answer them.</p>

<p>Awesome, sabaray, my H is a proud UVa Engineering grad - he feels they really prepared him well. In addition to the technical stuff, there is a good emphasis on humanities and writing (or was back in the day) that prepared him well for his professional career. Good luck to your daughter! Wahoo-wah!</p>

<p>P.S. My two ended up (one a 2007 grad, one a freshman this year) at that “other” school down I-81.</p>

<p>tiredofsnow, I’ve toured Clemson twice and had excellent tour guides both times. </p>

<p>Pierre, I wonder if Clemson hires freshmen to be tour guides? I kind of got the impression they have a lot of people who want to be tour guides. But if you wanna try, I say go for it!</p>

<p>I’m glad you had a good experience at Clemson, Lafalum84! It is a beautiful campus, but our D was quite turned off by the tour guide we got and the general lack of warmth she perceived there. Hey, everyone has a bad day once in a while, right? We just happened to be there the day that Clemson Admissions had theirs, I guess.</p>

<p>haha well I came across the application today, might give it a try
besides I have too much knowledge to be put to waste lol</p>

<p>^ you should do it. it’s a very fun job.</p>

<p>One of the more memorable guides we had was the young lady at Swarthmore wearing a very short skirt who came across as quite umm, non-intellectual. Perhaps this was a calculated move on the part of admissions to attract more male applicants.</p>

<p>Tiredofsnow, maybe you just caught the school on a bad day, who knows?</p>

<p>From SUNY Geneseo. We went yesterday and our tour guy was hilarious, witty, knowledgable. He reminded me of Ellen Degenerous with his delivery of every line! We could have listened to him for hours! My daughter was iffy going there and now it is her first choice. For you NY’ers, we also went to SUNY Bing- had a cheerful athlete- lots of enthusiasm and also went to SUNY Oneonta- scratching that one off the list! Hope this helps fellow NY’ers:)</p>

<p>Yeah, Lafalum84, that’s what I said in my last post:</p>

<p>“Hey, everyone has a bad day once in a while, right? We just happened to be there the day that Clemson Admissions had theirs, I guess.”</p>

<p>I have nothing against Clemson, believe me - I liked it! And this was back a while ago.</p>

<p>This is a thread about tour guide experiences - I shared our family’s. You’ll notice I have a less than stellar review of my own university’s admissions tour in this thread as well.</p>

<p>Most bizarre tour experience: We had nearly completed our tour of UCSB when the guide stopped and said “Now I know no one has asked, but I realize our school has a reputation of being a party school and I want to address that. Actually, 20% of our students don’t drink at all!” Uh, I believe the vast majority of UCSB students are under 21, so the 20% figure didn’t impress me much. Maybe that shouldn’t have been worked into the script.</p>

<p>But really, we had some fantastic guides all around the country. It seems like a very tough job, and most of the students handled the role with poise and genuine enthusiasm. Indiana University’s guides “won” hands down though and were the icing on the cake that made my daughter decide to go there this fall.</p>

<p>oh, and please realize that even though we keep talking, we CAN hear you make snarky comments to your child, and it IS distracting. if you’re going to criticize, place yourself further back in the group.<br>
and stay off your cell phones. :)</p>

<p>sorry, I’ve criticized way too much in small comments to my parents during tour groups</p>

<p>An apology to all the tour guides out there :)</p>