Tips for Tour Guides

The campus tour is one of the most important contacts with the school that a student can have. So many students react, either positively or negatively, to the “feel” or “vibe” of a school and base a huge part of their decision simply on what their gut tells them. The admission publications will tell them the nuts and bolts of a school. The admissions officers will tell them what’s available to them. The tour guide should communicate the essence of a school—fill in the gaps in the information that they’re getting. To that end, here’s my checklist of what has helped me frame tours in the past.

Know the facts: Have the info down cold. Jazz great Charlie Parker once said that the secret of music is: “Master your scales, master your instrument. Then forget all that and just play.” Tours should be the same way. Answering questions makes students more likely to make a personal investment in the tour and get the info that they want out of it. At the same time, you’ll be more ready to get “off the book” and change the tour as you go. I aim to have at least four things to say at any point on the tour—that way I can mix and match and if I completely blank out I know what to fall back on.

It’s their tour: The script is never sacred. Use it as long as you need it, but get off it when you don’t. If you have the info down, you can make little adjustments along the way to adapt the tour to what the group wants to do. You will encounter groups where everyone wants to see the Hall of Science and couldn’t care less about the Music building. So roll with it! Find out students’ areas of interest at the beginning of the tour so you can write your plan around that.

Pick a spot and chat: Find a convenient spot on the tour to sit down for five minutes and really try and get some questions from the group. Getting people to ask you questions is both the most difficult and most important part of guiding. If you make them ask questions, they can’t zone out on you and they’re going to start paying attention more.

Anyone you meet is fair game: As far as I’m concerned, if a student or a professor sees a tour group and doesn’t cross the street to get away from it, they’re willing targets. If you have people interested in history and you see a history professor, ask him or her to say a few words to the group. If you know your roommate just took a sociology class and you’ve got some prospective sociology majors, ask your roommate to talk about his or her classes for a minute.

Never let facts get in the way of the tour: The information is important—your script includes it for a reason. But it isn’t even close to being the point of you being there. There’s a reason you’re not replaced by a walking map—you’ve got your own experiences with any place on campus. Here’s what my experience has been”¦Tell embarrassing stories about your roommate, talk aobut what your professor said in class today, do anything to make your prospectives imagine themselves inside the different buildings.

Your school is unique: Think about what made you choose that school over all the other options out there. These peole might be taking ten tours in ten days. And the truth is, there are no truly bad colleges. Every school sounds impressive on paper, and after a while they might all start to run together. Make sure that your school will be remembered by putting something unusual and exciting in there for them to latch on to.

Don’t get bored: People always ask me how I could keep up at least one tour every day for two years and still seem interested. They know when you would rather be somewhere else, so try and be genuinely excited about the tour. No matter what the day has been like, you probaby applied for the job because you like going to school wherever you are and this is your one chance to convince them of that. So do whatever it takes to keep you in the right mindset. Do the tour backwards. Have a prospective student lead the tour and feed them the answers when they need it. Learn something about at least five students every time you go out. Get as far as you can speaking in rhyme. Walk backwards (or if you already do, walk forwards). Being a tour guide is a great job at a great school—above all, always project that to your prosepective students and you’ll be a success.

Tillinghast, Jeffrey K. “Campus Tours that Dazzle.” PNACAC News, Fall 2003.