- At Vanderbilt--a man walking around with very small shorts on a very large body, spinning a plate on a stick. No obvious purpose or occasion.
- At a Midwestern LAC, a stairwell piled with old shower shoes--30 or 40 pairs. Some of them looked like they'd been there for years.
A girl wrapped in towel came out from the bath room and walking down the hallway passing through a couple dozen parents and prospect students during a dorm tour.
Kinda makes the concerns on the coed-bathroom/coed-dorm threads seem kinda moot. ![]()
An empty Natural Light cardboard case on the ground outside of a dorm. On a Saturday morning.
Oh wait, I didn’t think that was odd at all. But another parent on the tour was SHOCKED. :))
Light beer is abuse of alcohol!
At my son’s school, the tour guide was so embarrassed when we were touring the dorm and there was a pile of condoms on the table. My thought - the more readily available the better!
A sign warning students on how to avoid bedbugs in the dorm, which apparently had just been treated for an infestation.
The Tempurpedic dorm room mattresses at Wash U in St. Louis.
A very physics/professorial looking mature gentleman in short shorts and a winter hat with ear flaps vigorously roller skiing with poles down the empty road between admissions and the green at Dartmouth on the first cold autumn Sunday morning with no vehicles in sight.
Our senior-year NYU tour guide telling us the school president tried to hug every student before they graduate, but they had not yet had their hug. About two minutes later, the president came walking down the street, and they got their hug.
The condom dispenser in the student center at my alma mater. Where were that when my friends and I didn’t need it?
Hey, I roller ski. Don’t make fun of it. ![]()
At Stanford - a student was driving around campus in a (rented? stolen?) steam roller and calling to other students to bring out things they wanted crushed. They brought out various belongings - a folding chair, some text books, one girl brought out a Barbie’s Dream House. (I’m not making this up).
Later in the tour he showed up again over on the other side of campus - squashing stuff over there too.
A tour guide walking backwards was talking about how secure the dorms were and their key cards. Over her shoulder, where the entire group could easily see him, was a guy climbing into the first floor window of the dorm.
You saw that all the time at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. That’s what cross country skiers did when there was no snow.
At Carleton, on the quad: a minivan stopping in front of us to unload a coffin from the back hatch.
On an admissions tour of the Middlebury campus in fall 2014, admissions staff flew a drone above our group of prospective students/parents in order to film/data-gather their body and head movements throughout the tour. Fortunately, tour members were told about this ahead of time, and visitors had the option of joining the group that was NOT droned.
The massive amount of tattoos on the tour guide.
At the USF tour there was a guy walking around with posters on his body about how all college students were going to hell (or something like that). He was ringing a bell and looked like he spent a really long time on Dead Tour. He proceeded to get in a screaming match with one of the underclassmen. I guess it was our welcome to Tampa.
At Yale a bunch of students with brooms between their legs playing (fake) muggle quidditch on the quad. Nothing better to do? They really looked strange…odd.
Not a tour, but my son’s Oxford interview with a (male) tutor who had bare feet and open-toed sandals in December was pretty “odd”. Definitely a case of trying very hard not to stare!
Visited a school in the DFW Metroplex Friday. On the way into campus there it s a sign with university name. Kind of out in a field, so no buildings immediately around. Young woman in yellow coat sitting on brick base of sign, smoking, at around 10AM. After our tour, we left campus for lunch via another gate. Came back to meet with a professor at around 2PM through the same gate we entered in the morning. Young woman in yellow coat still there, smoking. Had she been there for 4+ hours?
Taking a tour of the engineering facilities at a southern university where the tour guide kept talking about the “soul pit”. I had a great visual image of that until I realized my northern ears were hearing “soul” when he said “soil”.