| Noting that you are giving tours of Cal to prospective students.
Consider that Cal is a crapshoot for admissions to 98% of all applicants. These are anxious students and parents who have all kind of strange ideas about both the admissions process and the Berkeley lifestyle. In that vain...
1) Try to be disarming. Yes, many of your clients will not get admitted. If you've got the personality, a little gallows humor about admissions odds might lighten things up. If your delivery is poor however, you might be the one who is hung. LOL Make light of the panhandlers and the left-wing reputation of the school. It is what makes the school interesting!
2) Try to be reassuring. Most of your tour clients know that housing is a problem in Berkeley. Point out that most of the homeless on the streets are not freshmen who didn't win in the dorm lottery (see suggestion 1 here LOL). Give anecdotal stories about how students find the right housing situation. Point out that if you don't get admitted to the Business School, that the Econ majors do just fine in the job placement.
3) Do not mention anything that is in the brochures in your office or any other commonly read material. Most of it is just marketing anyway! Your serious candidate probably has read and memorized it anyway because they think it is on the SAT. I'm picking on one segment of your typical tour group here - the ones who take this all too seriously. They are looking for something else to give them confidence that Berkeley is worth all the cram hours they've spent and the countless retakes of the SAT to get that 2400. They want to know that once they get in here that there will be interesting stuff. If you've got a friend doing a research project in X department, tell them about your friend and how s/he came about the opportunity.
And more importantly, tell them that the most important learning they will do at Cal is the stuff that goes on outside of the classroom.
Hope this helps! |