Campus Ivy Tours

monydad
Thu, 20 Jan 2011 09:08:10 +0000

The Cornell tour was just fine when we did it this past summer, excellent actually. I don’t know about four years ago, but currently the tour guides are very well trained, both in campus knowledge and to take all efforts to be heard. D2 has tour guide friends and has described it to me. It is a tough process to get to be a tour guide there, and they do a great deal of training, probably more than at most other places. Of course that does not guarantee that every tour there is a smashing success.

We had the “cattle drive” situation you’re describing when we toured Brown, several years ago. The tour guide was actually talking into a megaphone to be heard. I’m not kidding.

I think there’s some hit and miss involved with this whole set of universities, they are all too popular it seems. Your group may be more or less crowded, depending on exactly when you show up, how many others show up then also, and how many guides they happen to have available for that particular shift. Maybe best experience could be for the earliest tours, before everyone else gets there? Just a hypothesis.

One thing I will say though, to do Cornell optimally you should plan carefully and reserve more time than for the others. Tours of the campus and of the freshman living areas are done as separate tours. (At least they offer a tour of the dorms, Brown didn’t). And its individual colleges offer separate information sessions, which are conducted at the individual colleges, not at the admissions office.