| While I think that tour guides should highlight what makes their school unique, you have to remember a few things:
1) You're doing the product examination, not the tour guides. The guides are experts on their school and only their school, and unless you get a tour guide who is really on their game, the guide probably won't even know how to market his or her school to make it stand out. To us, our college life is what it is, our buildings are no longer as pretty as they once were because we see them every day, etc.
2) I think it would be incredibly unprofessional for a tour guide to single out another college by name and talk about it... do you want to hear the Chicago kid talking about Northwestern, or the Mount Holyoke girl talking about Bryn Mawr? A lot of schools out there are very similar to each other, and I think I would think worse of a tour guide if he or she mentioned other schools on the tour.
3) It's your job to get a sense of who the tour guide is. Better questions than "What's the food like?" would be "What's been your favorite class so far?" "What would you change about the school?" "What's been one of your favorite experiences?" |