Making Campus Tours Better

[shoebox10]

I'm a tour guide for UVA's Engineering School. Here's some pointers to tourees:

1. Don't ask questions specific to your case (i.e.: will I get honors? Fin aid? etc) We most likely can't answer, and it makes us uncomfortable.

2. Don't talk while we're trying to give the tour. Minor chatting here and there is fine, you are there for you. But I've had some parents just talk to other parents the whole time, or keep a conversation with their child, sometimes about stuff not even related to the tour/school. We're giving up our time to help you, so let us do that.

3. Ask questions! If we can't answer it, we'll be honest and try our best guess if we can give one. If not, we'll point you in the right direction.

4. If it's a small group, make it personal. We'd much rather give a personal tour than make it seem like you're just following us around.

5. Let your child ask questions. Nudge them if need be to just ask a single question. Once over that hurdle, they warm up. But half the time I feel like I'm giving the tour to the parents, and it's awkward. We college kids don't bite

6. Show up on time. We start our tours and hang around the area for 10-15min to make sure there aren't stragglers, but not all tours are like that. Plus, it's hard to keep track of who has heard what. Lots of basic info is given in the beginning that is crucial to the rest of the tour.

7. Ask for the guide's email or contact info. Most of the time, they'll give it out. Then, sse that email. Sometimes, a student is the best resource for basic info. We know how our school works, after all, that's our job.

8. Know a bit about the school before coming. I've had students show up saying that they want to study physics, when in fact, physics is in The College, not the e-school. Sure, the tour is meant for learning more, but you should at least know some basics.

9. Sign up for mailing info at the school office if you can. We can only give you so much info in an hour, but if you're on a mailing list, you'll constantly receive more info that you might have missed.

10. Be courteous, and thank us!! There's nothing more rewarding that seeing a family/student walk away totally changed by our tour (for the better or for the worse). When people just walk off in the middle of the tour or leave as soon as it's done, it makes us feel like we've done poorly. We want to show you why we love our school, and so let us know how we did! I gave a tour once to 20+ people, alone, as the first tour given by me that semester, and I was a wreck! But a few families expressed how great I was and that they felt it was a great tour, and it gave me that boost I needed. Again, don't be shy

And, please, give respect to us and our school. Even if you decide not to attend right then and there, understand that this is our home. Be respectful, and quiet, when entering dorms, libraries(!!!!!!!!!!!!), classes(!!!!!!!!!!!!!), and other areas with students. Don't block doorways, don't walk sidewalk-width as a group. Again, this is our home, we're letting you visit, and we want everyone to be happy!

[Adultparentmom!]

#1. Tour guides, please know as much about the school as possible. What division is your sports team? Our tour guide's answer: "I think we might be division 3, I don't know about sports". Any sports. At all. Parent spoke up and said they were division 1 and had just won the big championship.

#2. If it is a big group, stop and wait for everybody and then talk - loudly.

#3. Praise your school. One tour guide kept saying: "We have to tell you this, but it is really stupid." Everything was "stupid".

#4. We saw on the school website that it is "famous" for a certain type of building, fountain, library, telescope, art, whatever, TELL us about it and show it off! Don't just pass it by and expect us to recognize it!

#5. Is there a prospective student or parent who doesn't want to see the housing? Don't tell us that they are ugly, small, dingy, boring, or just like any other school. Show us. One school had a "staged" dorm room set aside just for the tours. We got to see a room and I appreciated that.

#6. Toured one rather famous school and a crazy homeless person decide to take the tour with us (at a distance, but yelling obscenities along the way). This person was rather scary and many parents were upset. I kid you not, the tour guide acted like the person was not there!

Just address the situation. Say something like, oh, yes, we DO have colorful characters here, nothing to worry about. (Then get on your cell phone and call campus security.)

[shoebox10]

RE: #6 above

Most of us are 18-22 years old. We've never dealt with situations like that, and we're still learning what is and isn't normal and what should/shouldn't be 911-ed. I'd hope a responsible 30-50 year old would help us out and either alert us that we should call campus security/911, or do it for us. Yes, sounds lame that a parent on the tour should do something. But remember, we're kids too, and we don't have our parents here to help us out in situations like this. I know at UVA, we all are very trusting people (I go home and my mom has to correct me half the time that the world isn't as "nice" as I/my peers are) and something like that would catch me off guard. Please help us in situations like that, we need the guidance.

[Adultparentmom!]

Yes, shoebox10, that is very good advice. It seems that that event was not at all unusual at that particular school, so I believe that is how they handle it. They ignore it. I think that the parents were so shocked and we expected it would be taken care of by security. The person eventually wandered off to shout at other groups. You probably don't get that type of person regularly during your campus tours!

[bartleby]

This sounds silly and shallow, but it's a lot easier for teenage guys to pay attention when the tour guide is hot.

[fizix2]

What not to say on a tour:

"Are the dorms coed?"
"Well, the alleys are coed, but you don't have to have an opposite-gender roommate if you don't want to..." <looks of horror> "well, like, some people do that if they're dating..."

I said that on the first tour I ever gave. It ended pretty badly.

(And living with someone of the opposite gender isn't even that common at Caltech. It's actually pretty rare.)

Also: kids and parents, please ask lots of questions. It makes our job way easier. Don't worry about bugging us, answering questions is a lot more fun than actually having to talk.

[bibbist]

Most of our tours have been great, and most of our information sessions have been dreadful. The info session reports are for another thread! My son is looking at the schools. I think most tour guides forget that they are showing their school to primarily high school juniors who have never lived away from home. These kids need to hear about those "life" aspects at the school that mom & dad will not longer manage from home. Dorm life is important, food is important, health services is important! As an earlier post mentioned, it is important to know how many students live on campus, and what weekend life is like. At big athletic schools it's good to tell us how to get tickets to the big football/ice hockey/basketball game. For many of the kids, transitioning to the "school" part of college will be fine, but the transition to the "life" part will be a challenge - and that is where the right fit comes in. Tour guides can really help a prospective student find that fit!

[ajadedidealist]

The best tour I ever had was at Princeton. The girl, a freshman, absolutely adored her subject, and was positively overflowing with praise of the school. She cast Princeton as a sort of wonderland where everyone was really happy, but not in the whitewashed way one would expect. She was wonderfully eccentric - the most memorable part of the tour was her imitating the fire-and-brimstone gruffness of the school's founder (I think) while in the building with the portraits of past principals.

I ended up rescinding my application when I got into Oxford, but Princeton was certainly my first-choice US school.

[ts3433]

To the UCLA tour guide I had a couple weeks ago: Enough about the USC rivalry already! I came to hear more substantive stuff about UCLA besides that.

[coureur]

>>One factor that she has found annoying is when tour guides tout the benefits of an LAC (or a small campus or whatever) rather than *this particular" LAC, small campus, etc.<<

Women's colleges make this mistake too. With the sole exception of Wellesley, every women's college we toured spent all the time talking about the advantages of women's colleges instead of the advantages of THAT women's college.

[unalove]

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?"

[coureur]

>>I think it would be incredibly unprofessional for a tour guide to single out another college by name and talk about it... <<

They do it all the time. When we toured HYPS, the Stanford guide mentioned Berkeley. The Princeton guide talked a lot about Yale. The Yale guide was obsessed with Harvard. But the Harvard guide mentioned only Harvard.

[Triguena]

Please know the availability of various curricular/extra curricular options. So many times we have gotten wrong information. One guide told us there was no television production facilities (um, yes there are and there is a whole major/dept. devoted to it). At another school the guide said there were only student run acapella groups for people interested in singing (um, no, there is in fact a faculty directed choir for which you even get credit). The list goes on.

On the same tone (but in a different direction), don't assume that everyone on the tour shares YOUR passion for X major. DS has no interest at all in biology. Most of the tour could have lived without the extensive tour of the bio lab, the visit to favorite bio professor's office, the discussion of how much being a bio major at X college really counts in med school applications.

I'm on a roll now---
Another pet peeve, really talk HONESTLY about the social life. If it is greek centered admit that most of the students pledge. If most of the students go home admit that people make their own fun on the weekends. You end up sounding disingenous when you try to whitewash facts like these.

ABOVE ALL--don't brag that your school is the place for people that don't fit in while in high school. Trust me this is not a positive attribute.

[bethievt]

Triguena

A school being a place for students who didn't fit in while in HS was a major PLUS for my son. He *could* fit in anywhere, but if we're paying the big bucks, why wouldn't we--and he--want him to be at a best fit? The sportsy, fratty thing just isn't comfortable for him.

I don't see how a tour guide can have in-depth knowledge of every department and EC. I think they should be able to point you in the right direction to get your questions answered.

[DHRBC07]

With regard to Tour Guides talking about other schools. When I was a tour guide, the philosophy was "we don't make fun of school with whom we don't compete." A well placed joke about a sports rivalry is fine, but beyond that it is classless.