<p>Not irrational, but a turn off by proxy nonetheless: A friend was on a tour with her daughter at UChicago when someone not affiliated with the University or part of the tour started following the tour group, and began acting really strangely! The tour guide had to call campus police to intervene. (This story was shared when I told her my daughter was considering UChicago, and voiced my safety concerns. Not sure it helped!)</p>
<p>A plug for my alma mater Northwestern (even though they waitlisted my girl): We had a spectacular tour there! It is a very large campus, lots to tell and show. Our guide was knowledgeable, no question was too small or complex. He modified the tour based on what people wanted to see. Out of seven or eight tours, it was probably the best one we had, even though it was the ONLY tour where several of the tourees (Indian males – not to be ethnist but just to describe) were TALKING quite audibly about video games the whole time! I thought that was extremely rude but our tour guide didn’t bat an eyelash.</p>
<p>Back in the 70’s when I was looking at colleges we checked out a womens’ junior college. In the dorm there was a living room on a Saturday a.m. where girls were slouched on the couches watching TV in their PJ’s. My father (a Swiss Calvinist) said that I wouldn’t be going there because of their decadent behavior! How things change…</p>
<p>During the tour at a So Cal school, the student guide asked people where they were from. When we said Wisconsin, the student laughed. We filled out a feed back form. How obnoxious.</p>
<p>The Columbia tour guide mentioned her pajamas at least 5 times. Apparently she is quite fond of walking around campus, grabbing a meal, going to class, meeting with professors (in the library at 3 in the morning–it was harmless of course, but still!), and so on in her “jammies.” Yikes!</p>
<p>When I went to “check in” at James Madison University (JMU), I was told, “Let’s let the student speak for himself” essentially dismissing me in a very haughty tone. I felt reprimanded and my son felt insulted by the implication of not being assertive enough. </p>
<p>We both hated everything about the tour from that point on–probably because we never got over our initial anger. H, who missed the whole opening incident by going to the restroom, thought the school was fine. However, S dropped JMU from the list of schools to which he will apply.</p>
<p>One of our tour guides bragged how he played a major role in getting a speaker whose politics he disagreed with to cancel his appearance. Way, to encourage free speech and different opinions, dude.</p>
<p>At an accepted student’s reception at Johns Hopkins, I was struck by how quiet the campus was. A school day, with students around, it was so hushed and sedate and bland. Just a first impression that sort of sticks with u. Needless to say D felt the same way.</p>
<p>TheAnalyst—isn’t it funny? I just have a hard time getting over the rude and dismissive (maybe inadvertent) attitude of the -receptionist- at WPI, a great tech school son & I visited. Now that I’m hearing more and more good things about WPI (graduates are very competent, it’s a small, nurturing environment) I’m trying to ‘talk it up’ to son. He’s not at all inclined. We both had a less-than-stellar response; maybe partly colored by the initial negative impression.</p>
<p>Schools <em>really</em> need to put some big bucks (& repeated, extensive training) into their first line of student contact—admin receptionists!</p>
<p>Yeah, you’ve got to wonder what the colleges think they are accomplishing by snottiness. I so wanted my son to like Duke - it’s in such a good area for us - but they were so incredibly snotty and arrogant (it was like, “well, you probably aren’t good enough to go here, but we’ll let you take a tour away so you can see the privileged few”) he was totally turned off. When he was admitted, everything changed and they were oh so welcoming - personal calls and emails, personal letters, they really poured on the recruitment. Unfortunately, they had already lost him. He just felt it proved what bad manners they had :-)</p>
<p>A big turn-off for my daughter and me was tour guides who walk around backwards. (We had to overlook this, of course, because most do.) They invariably feel compelled to remark about another tour where they fell over something, and so we should be sure to tell them if they’re about to. They can never be heard by anyone more than 10 or 12 feet back, so they rarely impart anything to anyone not willing to jockey for a front spot. Our worst example was a tour at Northwestern where our (newbie) tour guide walked so slowly everyone was tripping over each other–one elderly woman actually fell and bloodied her forearm. The same guide brought us into our first building to see a typical classroom. The classroom was full, so he just told us which departments’ classes were in the building; on the way out we overheard an entirely different story from another guide! Despite NU’s being hubby’s alma mater, daughter crossed it off the list.</p>
<p>The tour guide at Wesleyan who told us the dorm bathrooms were not called coed but gender neutral, so as to not offend anyone who hadn’t quite decided on their sex yet!
My daughter was quick on her feet and asked it there were bathrooms for students who had decided on their sex?</p>
<p>huguenot–that’s interesting re: Duke and reinforces my impression about <em>admiss reception staff</em> being occasionally problematic. My son & I passed through Duke on a college tour this summer (he’s not applying–just wanted to see the great architecture, get a feel). We met up with a professor (on the near-deserted campus) who invited us into her home (she’s a dorm resident professor) & chatted w/my son for a long time about colleges, admissions generally and Duke. When she found out he likely wasn’t applying to Duke she gave him lots of advice about other area schools! Completely kind and gracious.</p>
<p>If the profs can be like this…why not the admission receptionists??</p>
<p>Schmoomcgoo…that’s an incredible story re: the poor lady who fell & bloodied her arm! shelley–funny re: the gender neutral bathrooms…definitely gives you a feel for the campus vibe, though!</p>
<p>I am so glad we did not encounter any Duke snootiness! (Just the opposite in our experience; folks couldn’t have been nicer) It would have turned off DS, but he is now very happy there as a rising junior.</p>
<p>What we did experience in the presentation for prospective students, was a very realistic depiction of applicants’ chances and a frank explanation of Duke’s admissions criteria and process. Perhaps that puts people off, because they are not saying, “You are all wonderful and we want you.” That wouldn’t be true, would it?</p>
<p>Carnegie-Mellon - We went there to look at engineering. Their entire rah-rah session revolved around “look at all the famous people who graduated from here”. If I had to see Ted Danson talk about his time there again I would have yacked. It was all fluff and no substance.</p>
<p>At a Brown reception for their diversity program, the director of diversity recruiting was sort of arrogant in that her attitude was, " see this is what you all could have, but we are only going to give you a wee little shot, because we are only doing this so that it looks like we are into diversity." The program was disorganized and the speakers(professors) were uninspiring and half of the speakers didn’t even show up. Just seemed as if the targeted audience wan’t important enough for them to do a good job. When D went to talk to her about her HS record, at the suggestion of her GC, she was dismissive, didn’t give her thetime of day. That left a bad impression, becasue D was excited about Brown in the beginning. The president of Brown is a warm and wonderful person with a fantastic vision for the school, but this ADM rep didn’t do the school any justice.</p>
<p>We had a interesting experience at Amherst, tour guide was wearing a t-shirt that said “Consent is Sexy” and telling us about her anti violence against women club! D could barely keep a straight face. Needless to say Amherst moved off the list, but has recently made its way back on.</p>
<p>The info session at Colgate had a ice hockey player (girl) with the admissions person, every other word out of her mouth was “um”, but it was great at their school because varsity athletes “are not separated, they can be your roommate, eat with you and even be in class with you” I kid you not!! and this came from the admissions person.</p>
<p>For D, the tour that turned her off was a small private catholic college (we are catholic) where the tour guide said: Pay no attention to the monks who walk around the campus; when visting the dorms, the cobwebs and dirty windows; then, in the dorm room the tour guide said all pictures of males with bare chests (she immediately thought of her Brad Pitt poster) would be ripped down from the walls. The doors looked like prison and the inside walls of the college were painted ciderblocks with crayon drawings, reminded her too much like grammer school.</p>
<p>I was so mad that we wasted time trying to get there because her #1 favorite was the college before that and we were rushing to get to this other appointment</p>
<p>Rght outside Harvard a homeless person dropped trou and urinated on the middle of the sidewalk. A police officer was nearby and just turned and looked the other way. Yuck! There are public restrooms.</p>
<p>Hard_Knocks: in fact, the Harvard Square section of Cambridge has been notorious for years for the very lack of public toilets. It took me a minute but I could still remember where they were 30 years ago when I was in college in Cambridge. And they all required going through a “gatekeeper” of sorts… I still remember ducking behind one of those old brick buildings late one night…</p>
<p>One of the strangest ones was at George Washington. The tour guide was very enthusiastic (and the person who put us in his group said we were very lucky, because he was the best tour guide.) He told us he was on his third major (he was a second semester sophomore), and that next term he was going to Denmark (he wasn’t learning any Danish), and what was most exciting about it for him was that he was going to get to spend three weeks in Russia! (:rolleyes:) Then he told us how excited he was to be joining a fraternity because fraternities were great and the college was encouraging more of them because there wasn’t anything to do if you weren’t in a fraternity. (in the middle of DC?) Then he told us about all the great restaurants he’d eaten at, because the University didn’t really have a meal plan. And then he pointed to the dorm with 1,200 freshman and said he had loved living there, and there weren’t any residential advisors or anything!</p>