It’s a Tuesday afternoon at Northwestern’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions. Pairs of parents and teens sit on couches and benches, silent and tired from a string of college visits. Many are doing the Chicagoland tour: University of Chicago, Loyola, DePaul and Northwestern.
New Yorker Martin Bergman, 16, says he has already visited NYU and Cornell University. Touring has become almost a routine, and he says he knows what he is looking for in a college.
“You get a good idea [from the tours],” Bergman says. “They are more indicative of the schools than the information sessions.”
So how does NU sell itself during tours?
“You can steal a glimpse of Lake Michigan on your right,” tour guide Lindsay Schuster says.
Schuster, a Communication senior, is one of the select few charged with walking backwards while reciting NU’s history. Schuster became a tour guide as a freshman, but it has been more than a year since she gave her last tour due to scheduling conflicts. Tours run weekdays at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.
All tour guides use the same set of facts they learn during training, but tours differ based on each guide’s personality and experiences.
Because admission representatives know that the parental audience is as important as the prospective-student audience, guides emphasize safety throughout the tour. Information from University Police and SafeRide rings true, but other safety services may be unfamiliar to current students. Students are supposed to be able to see an emergency telephone pole from anywhere on campus, according to Schuster. While there are more poles than most people notice during the day, the poles certainly aren’t visible from everywhere. Even then, visibility doesn’t necessarily mean you can reach them easily.
In addition to SafeRide car escorts for night travel, Schuster says that walking escorts are available. Though the SafeRide Web site makes no mention of foot escorts, students can call the University Police to request foot or bike escorts for on-campus locations.
Schuster adds that of the 4,000 classes offered at Northwestern, only 4 percent enroll more than 100 people. There are 20 students in about three-quarters of all undergraduate classes, according to the admissions Web site, and the student-faculty ratio is 7:1.
Northwestern isn’t a small liberal arts college; while this provides many advantages, like more areas of study, small class size just isn’t one of them. Schuster says that only introductory course enrollment balloons to state school sizes, but even this isn’t an accurate picture: Distribution requirements in schools like Weinberg and Medill require students to take a lot of introductory classes. Fisk 217, Harris 107, Coon Auditorium, and the lecture rooms in Tech are very familiar to students because they take required classes in those rooms.
Some tidbits are tactfully omitted from the tour speech. Ryan Field is mentioned, but NU’s dismal athletic record isn’t. The construction of Kresge Centennial Hall in the shape of the number one to honor Kmart (founded by S.S. Kresge) as the leading retailer in the U.S. isn’t followed by another story: Crowe Hall’s construction was intended to obscure Kresge Centennial Hall’s shape after Wal-Mart surpassed Kmart in sales.
And a flattering exaggeration or two slips into the tour. Pick-Staiger Concert Hall is said to have “one of the finest-quality sound systems.” While the acoustics inside are intricate, the sound system is far from fine and, in fact, barely adequate. The Communications Residential College is supposedly equipped with a “radio broadcasting network,” when in fact the signal from the cramped room in the basement barely reaches the third floor of the building.
Some interesting tidbits:
- The area around The Rock is called the “academic quad.”
- There is a restricted fifth floor of Tech where secret experiments are conducted.
- There is a “5-star hotel” in the Allen Center where former President Clinton once stayed.