Every year around this time, a Daily Free Press columnist takes it upon him or herself to criticize the hardworking President’s Hosts who lead the much-discussed tours of our campus. The same words usually crop up: Scripted. Sales pitch. Lies. They’re easy words to throw out for someone who, in the case of Katie Kelly, we would guess hasn’t been on a campus tour in three or even four years (‘Tours don’t tell the whole story,’ Nov. 15, pg. 3). Having read basically the same column slamming the tour ever since our freshman year, we would like to share a few facts about the real world.
To address the main point of Ms. Kelly’s column, Boston University President’s Hosts do not lie. They are told during training that we expect them to be truthful. If they have problems with the university, they are free to share them. On our own tours, we make no secret of the fact that Boston University is a really big school and it can be hard to find your niche. Do the tours tend to paint a positive picture of BU? Of course they do because the tour guides tend to be generally happy here. Students who volunteer to give tours (and they are all volunteers) tend to be students who are enjoying their experience here.
Quite frankly, it’s silly to think that tour guides at any university are encouraged to tell lies. One of the main goals at any university is to reduce transfer rates lying to applicants would merely yield a large student body of unhappy students, and unhappy students tend to transfer, do poorly academically or, worse yet, write poorly researched columns in The Daily Free Press.
As for the difficulties Ms. Kelly cites from her own experience, they have absolutely nothing to do with the tour. The undergraduate application instructs students who are unsure of their course of study to apply to the College of Arts and Sciences as undeclared. Nowhere does anyone make any promises that students will be allowed to transfer into whichever school they want in their junior year regardless of their GPA. Nowhere is a promise made that a student will be able to learn without working hard and maintaining their grades. No matter how many phenomenal faculty members BU puts in place (people like Elie Wiesel, John Schulz, Stephen Geller and many more), we’re all responsible for how much we learn in our classes. If you go to class, do the reading and go to office hours, you learn. If you don’t, you might not. It’s not the university’s fault if you’re not learning in your classes our faculty is outstanding and dedicated, but they can’t educate you by force.
Ms. Kelly also complains that at other schools, people say hello to her on the street and people go to basketball games. When did Boston University President’s Hosts trumpet a 100 percent attendance at basketball games? Further, at a school of this size, it’s fairly easy to find people to say hello to on the street. Perhaps if she refrained from treating transfer students like ‘lepers,’ Ms. Kelly would be able to find a few more. We’re sure Student Union President Ethan Clay, himself a transfer student, would be happy to discuss the distinctions between transferring colleges and leprosy.
The bottom line is, President’s Hosts try to put forth an honest picture of their own experience here at BU and, for the most part, they’ve had positive experiences because they’re involved, active students. Should we assume that they’re lying just because some students have had different experiences here (as students have different experiences anywhere)? We think not.
We would like to convey a final note to those friends of Ms. Kelly who feel compelled to serve the public by shouting ‘Don’t go here!’ at passing tours. First of all, you’re assuming that your own unhappiness means that no one will be happy here, which we can personally tell you isn’t true. Second, you’re making life harder for a student volunteers who’s trying to help other people in their college search. And third, you’re jerks. If you’re unhappy, there are more productive ways to spend your time than heckling innocent tour guides. Join a club, get a job, find something better to do and you might be surprised to find yourself liking it here a little bit more.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
