Honest Promo

On Tuesday I received notice that I had been selected to become a tour guide for GW! Here they call tour guides STARs, or Student Admission Representatives. I think this will be fun because I enjoying sharing my enthusiasm for GW, but on the other hand I fear difficult questions or disrespectful prospective students and parents. Basically rather than give arbitrary details about each building on campus, my job is to give the campus a personal feel by telling stories about myself and things I've done on campus and around D.C.

I really enjoyed the college search process. Though some tours could be extremely boring, If I was lucky enough to get an interesting and fun tour guide they could be great and really memorable. I still remember my tour at Oberlin College in Ohio. Our tour guide was Kurt Fisher, he was very flamboyant and feminine and extremely engaging. Me entire family was on the tour with me as we were on our way to Wisconsin, and they all loved him too.

One of the questions I always liked to ask on tours was, "What is your least favorite thing about [college name]?" I think this is a interesting question because the guide has to take a step back from promoting the school wholeheartedly and explain something that is not so pretty about the school. The trouble is that as a tour guide I will have to try to put a positive spin on whatever my issue may be with the school. In my case I would say my least favorite thing about GW is the money most students have and the way they display it, through clothing and accessories like cell phones. Cell phones are like a status symbol here and it's annoying how attached to them people are. But I guess beyond that this may be a problem occurring with teenagers across the globe, the addiction to the cell. However I didn't think it was as noticeable at Geneseo, my former college.

Another thing I may list as my least favorite is the lack of a cohesive school spirit. But just last night I discovered that school spirit does exist in full force where basketball is concerned. There were hundreds of students in their buff and blue singing along to the school song and chanting and cheering enthusiastically. It was so much fun! And really inspiring as well.

I really wholeheartedly love everything about this place and feel I can defend against any attack:

Is it worth the $50,000?
Absolutely, you are paying for great city experience as well as an education. There are few other schools in the country where you can have access to the free museums, historical monuments, wide array of cultures, great live music scene, speeches and talks by public figures, the metro that can transport you pretty much anywhere, internships and job possibilities anywhere within the government as well as with pretty much any private company or corporation you could imagine, National sports teams in hockey, football, basketball and baseball, real-world experience just from walking around campus and the city, opportunity to become adept at finding directions everywhere you want to go, a large intellectual community which means lots of great bookstores, the opportunity to vist embassies and get the scoop on a country right from the source...that's all I can think of for now.


What's it like having no campus/green space?
Well, I really don't mind it at all, in fact I like it that way. You know when you're on campus because of the flags and signs on all the campus buildings. We have our own versions of campus quads with Kogan Plaza, University Yard, and the benches outside Gelman. Students are definitely the majority of people walking around campus. The benefit of being within a city is that you become more mature as you have to encounter real world people who are walking to work, driving cabs, cleaning the dorms. At my previous college you could go a whole weekend without encountering one adult, and that was neither good nor bad, but it was different. And personally, I prefer not to spend four years in a rural bubble removed from the real world, I want to experience life now!

More to come...