Last term, after procrastinating for several years, I finally got around to getting trained to be a tour guide. In a 90-minute session in which I was the only non-freshman attending, I learned the tools of the trade. They apparently include the following:

• If you don’t walk backwards with finesse and agility, no one will take you seriously. Going down stairs backward is a bare minimum. I hear that at Olaf, they do backflips down stairs on their tours. If you really want people to believe the things you say, you should probably learn levitation.
• Most parents assume you take bribes from the Admissions office. This is patently false. Not only don’t you take bribes from the Admissions office, but I am so gosh darn happy to give tours that I regularly offer to pay them for the honor. At least that’s what I’ve been told.
• You will spend countless seconds filling out little yellow card with your name and email. These add a personal touch to your tour, and give prospective students a way to ask follow-up questions. Of course, this will never happen. These yellow cards get filed among the several trees worth of promotional materials sent to prospies by Carleton. If you’re lucky, your pride and joy may be memorialized as a bookmark in a college guidebook somewhere. If you’re unlucky, your tour members will friend you on Facebook: High School edition and plaster your wall with incomprensible blather.
• People that take tours are smart. Unlike you, they know that it’s stupid to come to a place like Carleton in the dead of winter. Instead, they come in the Spring, forming massive tour groups that descend like locusts on the sidewalks of the college.
• Carleton is–as amply proven in Carleton College Promotional Video No. 48–quirky. I don’t actually know what this means, but I’ve heard it’s something like owning the Holy Grail. Tour guides must play this up at every opportunity, because if they don’t, the Oles will sail galleons across the Cannon to steal our quirk, bring it back and please their Norwegian king. So remember Olaf, we still have the quirk, even if you have the West Bank. God shines on us, though I have no earthly idea why.

Being a tour guide gives you many other insights on Carleton. I have a newfound appreciation for the important things in life: the student to faculty ratio, substance free floors, and the saga of Friedrich von Schiller. But enough of that for now. I need to get some sleep. After all, I’ve got a tour in the morning.

Posted on April 4th, 2006 by Lee
Filed under: Uncategorized