As 2015 completes its transition into 2016 and the seemingly never-ending stretch of time known as winter break trudges to its close, I want to take a very special moment to give to you, my beloved admissions blog readers, a quite exciting presentation. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how I’m going to reinvigorate my Tufts tour guide material, now that I’m coming up on my third semester doing the job (because after a while giving the same talks can indeed get a little dry), and I think I’ve found some fascinating solutions – so, without further ado, I present to you: Concept ToursTM, Your Solution for a More Unique and Exciting College Tour Experience, Brought to You by Adam Kercheval and the Tufts Tour Guide Team!
Let’s get right down to business.
- “Now You Know How It Feels”: This is a simple twist on an old classic. In order to simulate the tour guiding experience for the tour group, this Concept TourTM asks a lot of the prospective students who go on it. Simply put, imagine the regular college tour setup, with a single tour guide walking backward, leading an ovular-shaped mass of about 20 prospective students and their parents. The Now You Know How It Feels tour simply reverses the setup, by having the tour guide walk forward, leading the backward-walking tour group around campus. This will surely provide a unique perspective on the school for guides and groups alike, with the latter getting to focus especially on the aspects of the campus that can be tripped over or stumbled down, which is, in this blogger’s humble opinion, an oft overlooked part of campus culture.
- “Herding Cats”: This one’s a personal favorite of mine. In the Herding Cats tour, the tour group walks forward throughout the campus as they normally do, but instead of having a tour guide at the front of the group walking backward and guiding the group by means of giving them an individual to follow, the guide in the Herding Cats tour guides the group by a similar system to that by which animals are herded. Allow me to elaborate: the tour group exists in an amoeba-like mob without any real direction. They are moved throughout campus as follows: say the tour group needs to move to the right. Instead of simply telling the group to move to the right or having the group follow her, the tour guide pushes, bites the ankles of, growls at, or otherwise intimidates the left side of the forward-moving tour group until the entire amoeba has shifted to the right and the tour can continue. It’s fun for the whole family!
- “Sprinting”: Some colleges in the US have already implemented jogging tours, but I want to take that to the next level. The Sprinting Tour is exactly what it sounds like: a very usual college tour, except at a sprinting pace. It’s actually fairly simple, except it could be made difficult by the frequently icy conditions on campus in the winter and by the fact that I am not in nearly good enough shape to ever be able to lead this tour. I also think this would be even more fun if the group didn’t know it was happening until, after the introduction, the tour guide suddenly sprinted away and the group was left to figure it out and follow before it was too late.
- “Amoeba”: This one is a lot like the herding cats tour, except the Amoeba tour lacks a herder. All this tour is is a large mob of prospective students, wandering wherever they want to around campus with a tour guide in the middle of it all, explaining things as the group passes them. Very laid-back. I’d also recommend it for a particularly wintry situation in which a March of the Penguins-style huddling mentality such as the one the Amoeba tour provides could contribute to overall group warmth.
- “White Blood Cell”: This is a direct extension of the Amoeba tour in which the tour mob still exists and floats randomly around campus, but also actively attempts to swallow up other tour groups, Amoeba or otherwise. The swallowed-up groups then have to join the original Amoeba. Biology!
- “Telephone”: Like the classic game played in a line in elementary school, this tour’s function relies on everybody trusting everybody else’s word, and the assumption that there won’t be that one person in the group who deliberately tries to sabotage the entire process. The tour guide leads the tour normally, but instead of speaking to the entire group at each stop, he simply whispers all of the pertinent information to the person nearest to him, who whispers it to the nearest person to her, and on and on, until the entire group is (theoretically) informed. No cross-checking between the tour guide’s and the final person’s information is allowed. (Note: There is a ridiculous theory at Tufts that the large concrete Pearson Chemistry Lab is designed, in case of some toxic emergency, either to a) implode inwards on itself or b) launch off into space in a dramatic sacrifice-myself-for-the-benefit-of-mankind display. I’m pretty sure this theory came from one of these Telephone tours.)
I’ll let you sit with those five Concept ToursTM for now, as I don’t want to inundate your admissions blog experience with too much of my absurd mind, but do know that there are about a thousand more possible concepts just itching to be developed, either in another post or in practice on an actual tour. The moral of the story here is that if you’re going to be visiting Tufts in the spring semester, be sure to sign up for a tour, because you never know what kind of experience you’re going to get.