My daughter is a tour guide at a very large state school ( she’s OOS). She’s a friendly girl and regularly runs into people while tour guiding. So many in fact that she’s been asked multiple times " Do you really know all those people or were they planted there to make the school seem smaller?"
I wonder if any schools do just encourage random people to say hi to tour guides. People seems suspicious. Lol.
It does seem really fake at some school tours.
At one school the tour guide was the president of her sorority. The only people she greeted were other tour guides. I’m sure she knew dozens more.
People are just cynical in general, IMO.
It makes sense to me that the admissions office would pick out gregarious, friendly types that would also happen to have a lot of friends and acquaintances on campus.
When we toured Berkeley we kept running into our guide’s roommates/friends, but they were the same 3 or 4 friends over and over. They were basically following us around campus and contriving to repeatedly bump into the tour group. It became clear they were pranking our guide - trying to fluster him or make him crack up and laugh in the middle of his act. He would just smile and carry on. It seemed to be all in good fun.
My kids went to a very large uni. I was always surprised when we walked around campus number of people they would hi to or give hugs to. Of course, there were 10K other people they didn’t know either.
My D was an admissions ambassador at a school of about 6,000 students. She often ran into people she knew while on her tours. Between people she knew through also being an RA, from her work at the volunteer center, her musical groups, performing at open mic nights and her major, she was always running into people. When she got a boyfriend on campus and when my middle son went to the same school, the number of people she knew increased exponentially. There were plenty of people she didn’t know, but she is an outgoing, exuberant type - just what they are looking for, so she had no problem talking to people. I asked her and she said that at her school, they were not encouraged to fake things.
@Scipio - That is hysterical.
My kiddo was also a student ambassador at a school with about 5000 undergrads. She always saw people she knew when she was on a tour. In fact, it was something she remembered when she went on HER first tour…and favorably.
She went on other tours where no one ever saw anyone they knew.
The summer before senior year, my afternoon tours were interrupted several different times by some crazy-looking bearded dude biking past the group and yelling, “Hi, Hanna!” The group would ask who this maniac was, and I had to admit that I didn’t know.
As soon as school started again in the fall, I found out it was Howard Georgi, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics (http://leverett.harvard.edu/facebook/show.php?leverettuid=168) and the newly appointed master of my House. He had memorized the House facebook and greeted his new undergrads wherever he saw them, whether we had ever met him before or not.
He’s still at Leverett and still memorizes every incoming student’s name before they move in.
Hanna,
He looks like Santa Claus.
When I was at Dunster the female Co-master memorized all our names before we arrived. Her husband, not so much. I don’t think he knew who I was after three years. I kept a pretty low profile though.
On tours the only one where the tour guide got lots of friendly ribbing was at Caltech - it’s such a small school and with relatively few women that any outgoing young woman is probably known by nearly everyone!
One of the favorite tours S and I took was at MIT - and the tour guide was terrific. Right after the information session, we assembled outside to take a tour in smaller groups, and we chose “Jeff” because he was majoring in something S was interested in. Just before we departed to go on the tour, another student yelled “Hi Jeff, Happy Birthday!” Jeff yelled “Thanks!” as another student came by and said the same thing - Happy Birthday, then another one, So a bunch of the parents - including yours truly - started singing Happy Birthday to Jeff. Jeff stopped us and thanked us, and told us it wasn’t really his birthday, his birthday was not until June, but several of his friends thought it’d be funny to razz him on his tours, and they told him not to tell anyone it wasn’t his birthday until someone started singing, or until he finished the tour. When someone sings, he knows he had a friendly crowd, and legend was that it meant someone on the tour would get accepted. He then said this legend goes back over two and a half years, since he started doing tours as a sophomore. S and I loved the sense of humor.
Reading the thread title, I thought this was going to be about contrasting humans and shrubs. Or topiaries. Was curious to see where it was going. Oops.
At Caltech, we had a private tour with a female in CS. She was fun and eloquent. When my son arrived on campus, he met up with her at her House. He ended up joining that House, and she again proved helpful. It was our first time with a guide walking backward in flip,flops.
I did many campus tours with my daughter and never once was suspicious that people were planted to say hello. As we pretty much toured only small colleges, I would have been alarmed if no one ever said hello to the guide. That would be a negative in my eyes.
D is currently applying for a tour guide job. She is shy, but we were amazed at our visit during parents weekend in October, when it seemed people said hi everywhere we went, and she said hi back. I really hope she gets the job, as it would be great for her ego to have people say hi to her when she is showing others around the campus. Her school is known for being friendly.
My daughter is an admissions ambassador at a large school with 15,000 undergrads. No plants. They all say hello and my daughter says hello back… names included.
I think it’s because her school is so large with about 30K undergrads that people are often surprised at seeing her run into multiple people during a tour.
“People are just cynical in general, IMO.”
that is a good trait (IMO)
unless it involves someone questioning me and or my motives 
Had to go back and re-read this - at first I thought how impressive for your D to not only recognize and respond by name to all 15,000 other students, yet still find time to get a couple words in about the school while giving a tour. The internet can be amusing sometimes
LOL I see where the confusion is. No- she doesn’t say hello to all 15,000! :-h
,Are guides trained to interact with as maybe people as possible as some sort of marketing tactic? It just comes across as contrived to me because the guide is supposed to be focused on the job at hand and the individuals in the tour group. I can see smiling or nodding at a passerby, but all of the overly friendly greetings, interruptions, and cutesy exchanges that seem to happen on every tour don’t seem natural or even appropriate to me.