Tour Guides 2012

Carolina Reyes '14 leading a campus tour this fall (because "fall" in SoCal=shorts weather)

When I visited college campuses many years ago, I always took it for granted that some bubbly and energetic specimen of university life would materialize, ready to escort a herd of silent high school students from bland edifice to bland edifice.  I recall tours that never went inside an academic building or dorm room, tours that showed a sanitized, uninhabited dorm room with a neatly made bed and perfectly stacked books, tours that didn't include any personal anecdotes, tours that included far too many personal anecdotes.  I never really gave any thought to the fact that these tour guides, whether paid or unpaid, had chosen to spend their time sharing their school with visitors, that this was something they genuinely wanted to do.

Now, as the coordinator of Mudd's campus tour program, I'm reminded every day how much students care about this institution, and how eager they are to convey that enthusiasm to guests.  So eager, in fact, that the tour guide selection process is always a mixed blessing: I get to invite some lovely Mudders to be full-fledged guides, and typically turn away just as many, because there just isn't space. 

This semester, we had twenty-eight applications for seventeen spots.  (This is better than two years ago, when it was harder to become a tour guide than to get into the college.)  Tour guide intern Kyle (below, left, with former tour guide intern Hannah) and I spent a marathon three and a half hours interviewing the candidates Thursday night.  It took some agonizing, but we finally settled on a stellar group of students who represent many aspects of the Mudd experience.

Among the seventeen new tour guides are two bloggers, a senior physics major who finally has time in her schedule, four President's Scholars, the freshman class president, and a student who just finished a two-year mission in Siberia.  And those are just the new guides!

Soon we'll have official training -- one of the quirkier aspects of Mudd tours is that every single tour goes through every single department, so our students need to be able to speak authoritatively about all majors -- and the kickoff pizza dinner.  But if you visit Mudd this week, you'll find the new guides already shadowing their more experienced counterparts and starting to contribute stories of their own HMC experiences.  Give them a warm welcome, and trust that whatever we show you during your campus tour, it won't be a sanitized, uninhabited dorm room.