I am not sure if this problem is isolated to only my campus, but I would imagine that it exists on other college campuses too. But students despise tour guides on our campus. I think most of the student body’s feelings towards tour guides can be summed up by this one post on our meme page:

From what I have heard, students who feel strongly about the tours given feel like the tour guides are painted a rose-colored picture with information that has been spoon-fed to us by the powers that be. But I am a tour guide on campus and from my experience through the tours I personally give, and by the conversations, I have had with other tour guides, there needs to be some conversations had and both sides of the story should be heard.

Because truth be told, we may be tour guides, but we are also students and we are not immune to the hoops that students must jump through and the systemic issues that infect the University administration. So here it is, from a tour guide, some truths from our perspective.

1. We’re volunteers:

This isn’t our federal work-study job, we’re not adorned with school apparel, there is no high paying, above-minimum wage salary for this job. We’re volunteers. The tour guides you see out on campus are choosing to give these tours and donate our time.

For an hour and a half we are dealing with the question-peppering moms, the spacing out kids, the along for the ride younger siblings, and the dads who most of the time just seemed along for the ride.

You’ve probably been on a campus tour before, you know what I am talking about. College tours are tricky things, high schoolers are trying to decide where they want to be studying at for hopefully four years, parents are figuring out if their student will have their entire Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs met, it’s stressful. But we put on our smiles and we tell it like it is, based on our own experiences.

2. We Can Tell It Like It is:

Yes, we are trained and have a handbook that is filled with campus statistics that parents might be prone to ask, but ultimately when we are trained (by fellow tour guides by the way) we are told to tell stories from our experiences.

Because we are volunteers we are free to say what we want about our college experience thus far. For example, I am honest, when I talk about dining, I say, “We have a problem with food insecurity on our campus.” It’s the truth, and it’s a common truth on college campuses across America.

However, at my school, we have a funky dining system where there are no dining halls but you are given an allotment of money each semester to spend at 90+ dining partners. For first-year students the way the money you are given breaks down to about $18-20 a day. This is not a lot of money. It requires budgeting.

As a generally optimistic person in life, I try to put a positive spin on this by saying that it allows for students to learn budgeting skills in a somewhat controlled environment before they are totally on their own after graduation.

But yes, the dining plan is not great because of the limited amount of dining dollars you have, the price of living in our city is expensive, and no the money on our cards is not a whole lot different than loading a debit card for your kid every 4 months.

To end our tours, we give a quick statement about why we chose to come to our University and after I give mine, I turn this question back to the students. I encourage them to ask themselves why they enjoyed the school after the tour and information session or why did they not like the school.

I am totally fine if they walk away hating the school because at the end of the day I am just here to educate them about the school and to share my experience.

3. We are students too:

Once again, we’re also volunteers, we don’t get any special treatment. From our own experiences, we know how annoying the financial aid office is, housing is annoying and may waitlist you even though “housing is guaranteed all four years”, the advising center isn’t the best depending on what school you’re in.

Emails are not responded to as promptly as you would like. There are massive amounts of bureaucracy across the organization of the school and it sucks.

We get it. We live it alongside you guys every day.

We are with these prospective families for an hour and a half, we don’t have time to sit down with these families and pick through every single detail of the school. So, if you happen to walk by our tour and think we’re saying something false, maybe you didn’t hear us correctly, or maybe we are just giving a simpler explanation to a very complex problem.

We don’t want to plague prospective families with every qualm and quip we have because now those are not relevant to the information they are looking for on a tour. A tour only scratches the surface.

4. Yes, we can sense you listening to us:

Every time I give a tour and I see students sitting nearby on their phones, I am wondering if they are listening to me and picking apart every single thing I am saying.

I try not to use the crazy taglines like “Putting Knowledge Into Action” or “The Fully Integrated Campus” because I know those would probably draw stares and glares from the students who are walking from one class to the next. I am just trying to tell these prospective families some information about the school we go to and share a bit of my story.

So please, listen if you want, but try to be receptive. It’s distracting when I am focused on how what I am saying may be pounced on by listening ears and then turned into a meme or posted on the “Overheard” page. I just want to try to get these families on and off campus in the most efficient way possible, with the most amount of information.

So, as a final word from a tour guide;I know our University is flawed. I am aware of the issues at hand. But if you have a friend who is a tour guide, the next time you see them on a tour, wave hello, or if you must, embarrass them by yelling “Happy Birthday” even when that’s false. But please, refrain from writing a critical analysis of what is wrong about our tours.