<p>I agree about the dining halls, at Clark, they were happy and all types/races sitting together. My son liked how friendly everyone was and spotted professors sitting with the students many times. Holy Cross was different. My daughter felt Villanova seemed more like Holy Cross observing interactions, more cliquey and in groups. No encounter, once, twice or three times, is the “real” campus, but it does give you a little feel of the campus,especially at a small college.</p>
<p>The “fibs” were saying things or agreeing with someone to keep the ball rolling, I knew the ratio or numbers were off, that aid wasn’t included in certain abroad options,as one quick example, but at the time, kept my mouth shut. I wasn’t asking the questions and I didn’t want to embarass the guide. I did tell the mother later,at one tour, to check the web site about the issue she mentioned. Sometimes tours are very quiet, sometimes the parents are constantly asking questions, sometimes monopolizing the guide…then I think some feel overwhelmed at times and just want to not say, “I don’t know” again.
I also love an enthusiastic guide, some are very genuine, others, I feel are acting and almost annoying. It does beat the few that act like they would rather be taking boards than being there. : )</p>
<p>At Reed, when we arrived at the admissions office we noticed a young man seated in the lobby intently staring into his laptop and VIGOROUSLY picking his nose. He turned out to be our tour guide. First impression notwithstanding, he was a hit - funny, intelligent, highly irreverent except for his palbable love and appreciation for Reed.</p>
<p>At Bates, they divided us into two tours: one for parents and one for students. The guide for the parents was pretentious, affected, and kept trying to feign a foreign accent. Several parents were rolling their eyes. On the other hand, we could see the kids in the student tour group ahead of us laughing and interacting with their guide in a way I saw at no other college. S said the student group’s guide was extremely funny and down to earth.</p>
<p>Despite the guide for the parents tour, my S and I were both favorably impressed with Bates - no peals of derisive laughter in our house.</p>
<p>Weird, because I know we definitely show the dorms and the dinning halls. The issue with the dorms is that some are on opposite ends of campus. I know some are in use during the summer for stuff like Teach for America, but there should’ve been some available.</p>
<p>Anyway, the best tour I had was at UConn. Very nice, smart, down to earth, informative guy. I didn’t end up applying because my mom thought I’d become an alcoholic going to school in Storrs. Awesome tour though.</p>
<p>Worst was Northeastern by FAR. Overweight Latina who needed larger clothing. She was loud, obnoxious and started dancing in the middle of the tour and encouraged students and parents to dance too. We walked out of the tour immediately.</p>
<p>Ah. That’s disappointing. Well I can tell you right now, the older dorms are dumps, but our two newest dorms are VERY nice. We only have one true dining hall to go along with one food court. The dining hall was renovated and they upgraded the food. It’s very nice. Food court is like any food court at a mall.</p>
<p>I think all strategies for tours/dorms/dining halls/academic buildings are appropriate.</p>
<p>I know that my kids made all their judgments from vibes of the school, something completely undefinable. It seemed to work for them.</p>
<p>No really memorable tour guides but we went to one highly respected LAC three times, and each time the students speaking were unimpressive.</p>
<p>OTOH: The students at the schools they ended up at were well-spoken and interesting. May have just been coincidence. It’s not an exact science. But all was well.</p>
<p>Our very best tour was at Champlain College in Vermont. We had a tour guide that was in a major similar to what my son wanted and he gave us a personal tour that was so good that my son, who is often quite reticent, asked numerous questions. He invited us to attend a performance he was going to be in that night and we did. </p>
<p>On a larger scale, Penn State main campus tours are also wonderful. I’ve visited twice, once with my daughter several years ago and last Monday with my youngest son. The tour guides knew their information, walked backward with grace and humor, “Please tell me if I’m going to run into something!” and didn’t apologize for the prison-cell like rooms. After the main campus tour we got a personal tour of the Information Sciences and Technology building that sold my son on the college. Whether he can get in or not is a different story.</p>
<p>I really, really like it when the tour guide has a similar major interest as my child. I think sometimes my son’s in particular cannot picture themselves at a college if the tour guide is too dissimilar then them.</p>
<p>I was another parent with a bad Bates experience (spring 2008). I was relieved D wasn’t in my group, because I think highly of Bates but my tour guide was a little snot. She said she was from Rome and NYC and kept referring to toilets as “WCs”. Come on - if you speak two languages, you know darn well that Americans don’t call toilets WCs. (Her English was unaccented and she was schooled in NYC.) She brought up toilets more than any tour I’ve been on, probably so we could hear her say “WC”. Then, unprompted, she told us to her football meant FIFA (European soccer). I wanted to ask if it was killing her to be in Lewiston, ME. (I like the area myself). She went into great detail about the food, which is very good, but the elaborate desserts at the spring formal made one mother snap and ask if they couldn’t maybe cut back on the expensive food and lower the tuition a bit. (The poor woman had twins on the students’ tour.) The tour dragged on too long and then we were all ushered into a chapel where we met up with our children and listened to an administrator talk about diversity - odd, considering there was no evidence of diversity on display among the nodding heads in the audience. Apparently everyone wanted their child to experience it, even if they couldn’t contribute to it. </p>
<p>D had only a slightly better tour and wondered if maybe we had second string tour guides because we happened to visit on the accepted students’ day. </p>
<p>Life is funny though. The very first tour we took for D left her with NO interest in the school we were visiting. The tour guide, who was a perfectly nice young man, stopped the group under an arch to sing the school song and invited anyone who knew the words to join in. No one knew the words and it was just a little too long and a little too weird. We didn’t see a classroom or a dorm at that school. We’ll get to see both when she starts there next month.</p>
<p>It’s interesting to hear all of this input about tour guides…I, myself am a guide at Bates, and am able to pin point exactly who is being discussed. Although I don’t give tours over the summer, I do research on campus, so the football player being discussed earlier is a Summer Intern guide and the female also discussed is a regular guide during the year. It’s a shame that many of you have had poor experiences with Bates touring. I know grapejuice discussed this earlier, and I can’t help but reiterate it, Bates tour guides going through an extremely selective process. We pride ourselves on honesty. I know I don’t shy away from pointing out the truth about situations, good or bad, although I wouldn’t be giving tours if I weren’t proud to be going to my school and didn’t want to share my positive experiences. Once you are in the program, no one really leaves, so individuals who give a poorer tour often stick around despite being encouraged to approach tours in a different way.</p>
<p>For all of you who feel dissuaded from visiting Bates based off of what has been said, I urge you to look beyond College Confidential. I know that a tour guide can make all of the difference in your visit, but no matter how good or bad they are at talking about the school, they are just one person who cannot represent the entire body.</p>
<p>In the experience of my first two applicants, spending a few hours poking around campus, visiting dorms, and engaging students was far more memorable than the tours given by the admissions office. And candid, too. Of course this should be done when school is in session.
The best example was my daughter at Princeton poking her head into the building that turned out to be the setting for many student stage productions. She talked with another student from the Midwest who was an astrophysics major, who decided after a few classes at Princeton that he would be a mediocre astrophysicist, and who became totally immersed in theater. Also stumbling into a university symphony practice at Alexander Hall that almost rivaled the Chicago Symphony. This from a population of students for whom music was, for most, not their major. The most amazing thing to me about the student bodies at elite colleges is the depth of talent.
It was Princeton for her, after that. The same impression wouldn’t have been the result of her campus tour.</p>
<p>iceikle252, I agree, I know 2 professors at Bates and I know it is a great college. It’s a shame that a couple of tour guides would take away from that, they aren’t the school and sometimes the tour guide isn’t even representing the typical student, just someone who needed a job or liked the idea of it.
I was lucky with my son when he was looking, we had some “winners” and "losers"in tour guides, some bad tour videos, etc. but he was very logical and discounted most of what was said. He concentrated on the feel of the campus, the building upkeep, the student body, the classrooms,professors, etc. He told me once, he barely remembered one thing a tour guide was saying who very annoying. He wasn’t going to waste the trip trying to listen to her. Sometimes the guide can very helpful, other times, you make the most of the trip in other ways. I find during the year, using my eyes to observe as much as possible, just as insightful as listening to him/her babble on. My son also found day visits if possible (never felt the need for overnights) helped, because you saw more interactions, classes, food, how busy things were, etc.</p>
<p>iceikle - I may not have been successful, but I was trying to make the point that people need to look beyond that first impression. I’m still mystified as to why Bates would have chosen the student I had as a tour guide, because I know the student body has a reputation as friendly, accepting, interesting, intellectual. I know that because it was my second round of college visits and I’ve known students at Bates. The tour guide was an outlier. I do believe she turned off other parents on the tour (one couple apologized, said they had to be elsewhere and left. A half hour into the tour? They just didn’t like what they were seeing/hearing.) </p>
<p>That same spring I was sitting with a group of parents and kids at Tufts waiting for our tour to begin. There was talk of where people had been visiting and then the talk turned to the difficulty of admissions and the desire for a good school that was also a fun place to be. I asked where that school was - and a mom who worked for another university said, without hesitation, “Bates”.</p>
<p>lefthandofdog, you and I had the same Bates tour guide, and you nailed the description, especially the constant references to the “W.C.” And the parents in our group had the same reaction - one guy even started heckling her after awhile. </p>
<p>Having said that, I want to second (or third) the suggestion that a tour guide is only one part of the campus visit, and my S and I both left Bates with a very good impression.</p>
<p>This topic took me down memory lane. Although I totally agree that one has to look beyond first impressions, like tour guides, when assessing colleges, I also remember that it really helped my son with the process of weeding & creating a list of schools. </p>
<p>So may schools are excellent or similar that the unexpected experience can give time to pause & reflect on what one wants or needs. Other issues, not necessarily directly related to the tour guide, can come up that help one, such as size of a campus, its location, amenities surrounding the campus, etc.</p>
<p>Wow. Iceikele, you might want to have a talk with your boss about the “W.C” tourguide… sounds like she’s inadvertently turning off a lot of potential students. I’m sure that’s not what Bates intends from their tours!</p>
<p>Back in the day I used to own a small business. My office manager once asked why I spent so much time interviewing receptionists; the answer was simple. The receptionist was the first (and sometimes only) contact with the company. Rightly or wrongly the receptionist’s attitude and appearance sent clients a message about my company and the type of people I hired; they set a tone for all subsequent interaction.</p>
<p>Tour guides at colleges are no different. A great guide can confirm your opinions as well as overcome concerns. A bad one will prove your misgivings or worse, they will put doubt in your mind. They are the person designated by Admissions to represent the institution. Like it or not, the moment they meet the group they become “The School”.</p>
<p>Many guidebooks tell you that a tour is a way for the student to answer: “Is this someplace that I could see myself fitting in?” A poor tour guide makes it difficult for anyone to say yes. That may seem superficial and immature, but with so many college options out there, why should the students and parents be put in the position of “looking past” a tour guide’s incompetence? Worse still, the two bad tours son1 and I took left me thinking that if the admissions office cared so little about this very public position, what else weren’t they going to care about? That may be unfair, but it certainly is human nature. Never put a potential customer in the position of having to talk themselves into buying your product because you did a poor job representing it; you’ll lose more often than win.</p>
<p>I have no experience with Bates but I have visited many colleges with 3 children. We all know that the college should not be judged by the admissions staff or the tour guides. But they do indeed give the first impressions and often lasting ones. Just as in the housing market…that first drive by or walk up the sidewalk sets the tone. If negative, it’s sometimes hard to appreciate the rest with an open mind. And of course, the teenagers are even less likely to maintain their attention. With so many good colleges out there we need some quick filter to help pare down the list.</p>
<p>Great topic. We’ve done three tours so far, with lots more to come over the next few weeks. We’ve been lucky: all three of our tour guides have been polite, knowledgeable, and skilled at their job. The most memorable of the three was our GWU guide, an entertainingly manic, motormouthed banty rooster of a kid who not only was expert at walking backwards–through the streets of DC, no less–but enlisted those nearest him to watch the stop lights for him so that he could keep walking and talking right through intersections. His only flaw was a distracting habit of using the phrase “with that being said” as a random subject-changer (“our dorms are the best in the country–with that being said, there’s the law school on your left”).</p>
<p>Our Brandeis and Goucher guides were less distinctive–just nice, articulate young people who each gave a very good impression of their school. The Brandeis guide was a nimble young man with a habit of clambering up onto walls to address the group so his voice would carry better. He scored points with us by volunteering, after hearing that our son was a musician, to lead us on an informal tour of the music building after the main tour was over. The Goucher guide impressed us by showing us not only a dorm room, but <em>her</em> dorm room–which showed no sign of having been specially cleaned up for the purpose, though it was reasonably tidy as dorm rooms go. I thought that showed an openness that spoke well of her and, by extension, of the college.</p>
<p>Interesting notes some people have made about the impressions you get from other visitors on the tour. At Goucher we were surrounded by mildly offbeat-looking kids that we felt our son might connect with pretty well. The kids on the GWU tour seemed much more jocky and middle-of-the-road by comparison (lots of buzz cuts on the guys and deep tans on the girls). We know better than to take this without a large grain of salt, but the difference was striking.</p>
<p>Have to agree with Debruns, that Providence College gives a good tour. My D and I had two young men, one experienced and one training, that did a terrific job. They clearly loved their school and conveyed that to the group. What impressed me most was that they both hung around after the tour was over to answer any questions. The young man that we spoke with, addressed my daughter directly, even when I asked the question. He gave a business card with his e-mail and encouraged her to follow up with him on any future questions.<br>
The other aspect of Providence that I like was student involvement in the info. session.
At our BC tour, I was disappointed that they didn’t show a room. D and I walked up to upper campus after and peered through some windows just to get a feel for size.</p>
<p>We didn’t get a view of a dorm at BC either, but luckily, my other daughter was moving into a dorm for volleyball camp, so we got to see one anyway. </p>