Maybe first impressions do matter. Choosing where to go to college is one of the most important - and nerve-wracking - decisions that face high school students.
Parents, teachers, older siblings, and guidance counselors can help, but in the end, it is the student who must decide as to which school "feels" right. And what better place to do so than at the actual school?
In order to separate reality from the fancy booklets filling prospective students' mailboxes, many high school seniors make visits to colleges that interest them. But while campus tours give students a feel for atmosphere, how much of true campus life can be reflected, and how much is simply a walking, talking brochure?
Prospective students packed the lobby of Bendetson Hall yesterday morning waiting for the 9:30 a.m. tour to begin. The high school students filled out the standard "Yes, I'm interested in Tufts" cards, while parents flipped through glossy Tufts bulletins and disinterested younger siblings wandered through the crowd. Four smiling tour guides ushered everyone outside, where they quickly separated the large group and began their introductions to the Hill.
A fairly daunting group of 50 people faced freshman Katie Shuman as she began her tour. Shuman spoke about her experiences as a liberal arts student who decided to switch to engineering, her time on the sailing team, and her academic experiences.
"The average class size here at Tufts is about 20 students per class," Shuman told the group. "Obviously, that is skewed quite a bit, but any large lecture class meets twice a week with a smaller recitation that meets once a week," she said, adding a realistic twist to a statistic Tufts likes to boast about.
According to Admissions Counselor Julia Motl, the volunteer tour guides are chosen based on the experiences they can share with prospective students and their overall enthusiasm for Tufts. She emphasized that tour guides do not express one specific image of the school; rather, each guide relates his or her own slice of life at Tufts.
Still, Motl, said, "Tufts is probably trying to convey the image - like most highly selective universities - that this is a place where people are smart but not cutthroat. A place of balance.
"My job is not to ingrain a certain image into people's minds. It's my job - as well as the tour guides' - to convince people that Tufts is a cool place to be," she said, adding that the large number of students who volunteer to promote their school should speak to University's strength.
"The purpose of the campus tours is to showcase as many aspects of Tufts life as possible and to give the students a look at the things that the Tufts community is interested in," Motl said. "We want to give them a feeling of what life at Tufts would be like."
To do so, guides must give an accurate depiction of the school while also expressing complete enthusiasm. - sometimes a tough mix. While Shuman did reveal a few aspects of campus living that weren't perfect, she stuck to a positive monologue for the most part.
"Everyone is really satisfied with the housing system," she assured her group. "Juniors and seniors can get housing if they want it but most of them choose to live off-campus." Of course, while it is true that most juniors and seniors live off-campus, it's not always a matter of choice.
Although Shuman said she doesn't focus on the issue in her tours, she believes that diversity constitutes a big part of the image that Tufts wants to project. "I think a lot of people really want to give the impression of Tufts as being diverse and very aware of the community," she said.
Throughout the course of the tour, Shuman failed to mention any of the culture groups on campus - even though with over 30 cultural organizations and houses on campus, high-profile groups such as the Tufts Transgendered Lesbian Gay Bisexual Collective (TTLGBC) and Tufts Christian Fellowship (TCF) are an everyday part of many students' lives.
But Motl pointed out that each tour guide brings his or her own individual experiences and interests to the tour, and won't necessarily cover all the bases. "All the student guides have different perspectives. I think you'd find that if you went on ten tours, you'd get ten very different perspectives," she said.
Ross Reynolds, a prospective student's parent, did hear all about the cultural aspect of campus life during a tour yesterday. The Minnesota native was visiting Tufts with his son, Nick, a high school junior.
"[The tour guide] did a good job of reflecting on the culture groups, even though she herself didn't have a background in some of what she was talking about," Reynolds said. He added that the tour group represented a wide range of backgrounds, and that by talking about the different culture groups, the guide helped to show where each student might find a niche.
Reynolds said that one subject not emphasized on his tour was sports. "That probably reflects the school, though," he said. "If a student is really competitive and interested in sports, they probably won't be applying to a Division III school."
Both the tour and the campus impressed Nick's mother, Pamela Allen. "There's way more of a connection between the community and the school here," she said. "It seems much more diverse and real-world than some of the other schools."
Reynolds' overall impression of the school was one of "middle class."
"At the Ivies, you get the impression of privilege - I don't get that impression so much here," he said. "The environment feels like the social-economic strata is much more diverse."
Reynolds said he came away with a more positive impression of Tufts than he had expected. Of all the schools his family has visited - including Bates, Colby, and Bowdoin - he said that Tufts was the "most appealing so far."
Sophomore Christina Coronios remembers that feeling. Her campus tour sealed the deal when she was choosing a college. Coming to April Open House as a senior in high school, Coronios hadn't yet decided which school she wanted to attend.
"[The tour] made me want to come here because I actually got to talk to students," Coronios said.
And, for the most part, her experiences as an undergraduate echo what she was told in the tour. "My tour guide was really fair," she said. "I think that there's a lot that you can't cover in a tour, but I didn't find anything she said to be totally wrong when I got here."
Campus tours aren't always so positive for prospective students, however. In fact, Shuman's own experience as a pre-frosh on a campus tour wasn't so great. "After I went on my tour, I didn't even want to come here," she said. "It was a bad day out and the campus didn't look very exciting. And the guide wasn't all that enthusiastic." To avoid such a situation, Shuman tries to keep her tour upbeat, regardless of the weather.
"In general, I think that people walk away with a good impression of the school," Shuman said.
