Your guide to tour guides

    "Hi, my name is Ian. I'm a sophomore from North Carolina, and I enjoy long walks on the beach, candlelit dinners and gummy worms," sophomore tour guide Ian Hainline said in a charming Southern accent to a group of visitors exiting the Office of Admissions.
    Several times a day, student tour guides gather outside Bendetson Hall and compete with their colleagues in enticing prospective students, parents and tag-along siblings with one-liner previews of their campus tours.
    For students who ahve to court admissions officers with thank-you notes and memorize statistics from Fiske's colossus of a guide, the college tour can be one of the more pleasant experiences under the "college process" umbrella. But seldom do prospective students shut off their cameras and wonder for a moment wh their tour guide is giving up free time to give tours on a Monday morning.
    "Many students I have interviewed about tour guiding have said that they wish more people knew about Tufts because they are having such a great experience here, and they want to share their excitement with prospective students and their families who visit the campus," said senior Adam Dworkin, a senior intern at the Office of Admissions and former tour guide.
    Sophomore guide Brian Agler shared a similar view.
            "I distinctly remember my [college] tour, so I feel it's a good way to give back, and at the end of the day I think it's what draws a lot of people here," he said.
    Other tour guides look back on their application experiences with less nostalgia and hope to improve the system by volunteering for the Student Outreach Program, the division of the admissions department that coordinates student-led tours.
    "I like being a tour guide because I hated the college process and everything that went along with it. It's like going through puberty all over again, except this time you have tests to monitor how well you're doing," sophomore Ben Jaye said. "I thought it would be interesting to finally be as involved in it as I could be and make it better."
    There are a host of reasons why students choose to take the tour guide path. Some sign up in order to practice their public speaking skills, while others want to get more involved with the Tufts community and meet new people. Agler, a member of Tufts comedy groups Major: Undecided and The Institute, thinks of his tours as an opportunity to practice his hand at stand-up comedy. Still others have no idea why they enjoy scheduling one hour a week to pitch the university to visiting strangers.
    "I ... like to hear myself talk," one anonymous freshman tour guide said.
    The one factor that does not seem to drive motivation is monetary compensation. While many schools pay their students to show visitors around campus, Tufts' only form of payment is a $10 gift certificate to Barnes and Noble, awarded each semester to guides who complete three mandatory "special" tours in addition to their scheduled weekly tours.
    Still, roughly 100 students compete for fewer than half as many tour guide positions each year.
    "I never thought of tour guides getting compensated until someone else mentioned it. I understand that at other schools, the tour guides are compensated more heavily, but I also imagine it's a much larger time commitment," Hainline said. "The beauty of working in the admissions office is you can be as involved as you want to."
    At Tufts, tour guides are selected through a systematic process. Interested students fill out a general application form and interview with an admissions officer or current tour guide. Based on the interview, the first cuts are made, and second-round candidates are invited back to give a mock tour. The coordinators then invite a final group of tour guides from this cluster to undergo formal training and begin their work as campus guides.
    Each tour is essentially the same tour from a different perspective, Hainline explained. But tour guides agree that perspective and personality are what make a tour successful.
    "I want people to have a good time on my tour. Chances are, they just came from an hour-long [information] session that's been fairly dry," Agler said. "I like telling jokes and view it more of a performance than anything else … Sometimes, I also like sliding down railings when I'm giving tours."
    A more standard way to pique audience interest is with personal anecdotes relevant to campus landmarks. University President Lawrence Bacow, in particular, seems a popular protagonist in many of these sagas.
    "There's one I always tell, about when a tour of mine was walking by the President's Lawn one day and Larry came out and poured us all hot chocolate," freshman tour guide Diane Widergren said.
    Jaye had another story involving Bacow.
    "I tell [my tours] about the time I walked by the president's office with a cactus I'd just bought and he spent a couple of minutes telling me how to properly take care of my cactus," Jaye said.
    The legend of Jumbo, of course, is always a crowd-pleaser as well, but some tour guides prefer not to rely on orthodox tour material.
    "I'll take things that [the program coordinators] say and make them my own," said one sophomore tour guide, who requested to remain anonymous. "Like that story they tell us about how you'll marry the person you kiss under Bowen Gate — I explicitly tell people that I think it's B.S. Or when we pass by the cannon, I'll say that some people think it faces a certain school in Cambridge that I'm not allowed to mention by name but that rhymes with Harvard."
    Some tour guides even dabble in social experimentation. While none of his ideas have yet materialized, Jaye has planned several hypothetical skits for mid-tour entertainment. One involves spreading of a rumor among incoming students about a Tufts tradition to have someone on campus dressed as Waldo of the "Where's Waldo?" books at all times.
    But like most jobs, tour guiding comes with its obstacles as well — there are parents who ask too many questions, students who ask too few and, worst of all, those who ask the questions you had hoped to avoid.
    "The hardest questions are the most personal and the least personal ones," Agler said. "The two big ones for me are drinking on campus, which you can kind of dodge, and what the worst thing about Tufts is."
    Hainline also found questions pertaining to alcohol particularly difficult to address.
    "People's personal philosophies differ so vastly that what you view as acceptable can vary from one person to another," Hainline said.
    Questions that are beyond the scope of the tour guide's knowledge can also pose potential quandaries.
    "Like if someone asks me about Greek life," Jaye said. "I'm not a frat boy, and I don't go to frats very often. I'm too far removed to give an honest and fair response."
    That said, Jaye explained that students on campus are always eager to assist.
    "Oftentimes I'll be in the theater, which I don't know very much about, and I'll just stop a student working there and ask them to talk about it, and they always talk about it with pride," Jaye said. "People are more than willing to talk about what they do here because they're proud of what they do, and they're proud of their school."