I am faster at walking backwards now than I am at walking forwards. I am a slow walker when it comes to forward walking, but man, I have perfected my backwards walking skills. What was your first look at college? If you're listening to this now, you might be a Northwestern student, go cats.
You might be an alum, maybe you're a member of the Evanston community or a high school student thinking about your future, or maybe you don't fit into any of these categories. In any case, you may have taken a college tour in your lifetime, if not at Northwestern, then somewhere else. You light around the campus, you learn about the libraries and the residential life and the research and the study abroad and the dining halls and the traditions, and the person who tells you all of that, the tour guide. At Northwestern, tour guides are students who give prospective students an introduction to the campus.
We're considering how much we hear from tour guides about the university, we don't often hear about them. That's what we're here to do today. From the Daily Northwestern, I'm Scott Wall. This is NUD Classified, a look into how wild cats thrive and survive at Northwestern.
So the tour guide intro, exactly what we do whenever we introduce ourselves there. So I am Nick Ocaiza. I am a senior in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, studying political science, history and statistics, and I am originally from the Indianapolis suburbs, the science building, what cares. Nick Ocaiza is a tour guide coordinator at Northwestern.
So hello, my name is Yasmin Mohamed-Rafi. I am a third year SESP student studying human development as well as minors in religious studies and in Eastern North African studies, and I'm also a tour guide at the admissions office. Hi, my name is Lydia Orta. I'm a sophomore here at Northwestern studying economics and environmental policy and culture with the minor in business, and I'm a tour guide here on campus.
The Kaisa, Rafi and Orta will be your guides to the world of Northwestern tour guiding. Rafi says the role of a tour guide is usually a 90-minute commitment for each tour. Pretty much just for guides, what to do with a short stick of is, in an hour and a half span, you take a group of 15 to 25 potential students and families, and take them around campus, show them all your favorite bits, tell them all your favorite anecdotes, and pretty much just make a pitch about Northwestern to these students. Sometimes making a pitch means exaggerating your love for the University of it.
I definitely put on more of a peppy, I love Northwestern tone whenever I'm giving it to her just because at the end of the day I'm being paid by the University to show someone around. Orta says the experience of a tour depends on the tour guide, ranging from the jokes told to the root you go on. It's very flexible. There are a certain number of buckets and stops and things that you need to talk about.
That being said, I feel like most guides follow the same route just because we are learning from each other so the same kind of lines and the same organization get passed on from tour guide to tour guide. But technically there is that flexibility and if you do go on different tours with different guides, you will notice that they're each have their own nuances and are a little bit unique. It just kind of gives that personal touch. But Kaisa and Rafi both agree that the personal touch makes the admissions process feel more human.
You can read online read forums, you can go through all of the materials that Northwestern or any other university has on their website, but isn't unless you're being someone either in person with a campus tour or having a conversation with a student online one-on-one, where you can really start to feel what the campus environments might be like. The admissions offices seem to be this cold, unforgiving entity that accepts your rejection based on your application. All that feels very much dehumanizing and I think the tour guides then to be a humanizing force that shows the personality, the face, the love of the school in this case Northwestern. Aspiring guides go through a training process before they can give a tour to prospective students.
The first step of the process, making sure the guides know the facts. We have around a hundred page manual just one facts about Northwestern and all the buildings, all the academic things that are important, all of the sports statistics that we like everyone to have a decent idea of. It's not a memorization that we know that we're going to write 100 pages worth of content, but there are one or two closed book quizzes that we ask people to do before they transition to like in-person training. After passing the quiz, the next step occurs during actual tours.
What it says, the bulk of the training is in-person. First you'll shout out a few tours and this is where you don't say anything, you just go along for some tours, then you do some joint tours, so you're with a trained guide who's there in case you forget to say something, you can also learn from them. And at this point, you will have heard the skills so many times that you are ready to be a guide. But according to Orta, the final test can be awkward.
You have to go on a one-on-one tour with a guide coordinator. As tour guides, Vikasa Orta and Rafi have some memorable stories from the tours. One that stood out to Vikasa was when he learned that actor Steve Carell was on his tour with his son after the tour had already ended. I was like what?
Steve Carell's son was on my campus tour and his wife was there and he was there and I didn't recognize him. Maybe I just wasn't looking for globally known celebrities to be touring with me on a tour in the middle of July, but I guess he was there. Orta's most memorable tour was a sentimental one. One of the most memorable tours I ever had, there was a little girl on the tour.
She had to be around six, seven, eight years old and she was the single most excited person about Northwestern I've ever seen. Her older sister who was on the tour seemed like every other interested student just asking questions about like academics, that's a thing. But after the academic session she got out and was like oh my gosh I love how you can study so many different things. And I can study two separate things and I love how I can do research here and I'm like you are fully like eight years old.
What are you saying? That was definitely adorable because I knew I was giving a tour to a future Wildcat. For Rafi some people can turn a normal tour into a memorable one like a couple she encountered. There was this couple walking super slowly ahead of us and they were like we lost our tour group and I was like okay the last tour group went out an hour ago and they were like we're gonna just join you guys and I was like sure I can't join us.
You know we're walking past the main library, past the hearing I turned around this couple's gone. Rafi paused the tour to find the couple by gearing. They were just standing in the middle of the grass just kind of staring at stuff and thinking photos and then I understood how they got lost the first time. So I asked what they wanted to keep walking with us and they were like you know what I'm actually gonna just keep enjoying this.
I was like sure that's fine. So that's the story of how they miss not only one tour group but two just because they were taking it at their own sweet time. For anyone listening who was applying to colleges or thinking about it ask your end you guides for advice. But Kai says he would give amazing college application advice because he works so closely with the admissions office.
I would be a really really good school admissions counselor. I could get you or anyone you know into probably quite a few top schoolers. I know when the last year was going before and I know a couple other top 10 schools look at the exact same things. From the Daily Northwestern I'm Scott Wong.
Thanks for listening to another episode of NUD Classified. This episode was reported and produced by me. The audio editor of the Daily Northwestern is Eric Uschman. The digital managing editors are Joanne Hainer and Olatunji Osha Williams and editor-in-chief is Alex Perry.
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