Confessions of a GCSU tour guide

She peeks her head into the double doors, swipes her head from left to right, and shuts the doors behind her. She rejoins the group in front of her, consisting of around 10 people–varying from prospective GCSU students and those students’ parents. She shuffles a bit and claps her hands together.

“I’m from Lafayette,” Melanie Wooten, senior biology major and GCSU tour guide, said. “It’s lay-fee-et, most people think it’s lah-fee-it, but it’s not.”

Wooten says this is one of the hardest parts of being a GCSU tour guide—finding entertaining subjects while waiting for the previous group to clear the way before she starts her own tour. Wooten gives these tours to prospective students every Tuesday and Thursday, each time finding a way to condense student life at GCSU into a two-hour time frame.

“We’re told to be positive, like we’re not going to tell a lie, but if someone comes to us and says ‘It’s a suitcase college’ or ‘Where’s all the parking?’, we’re encouraged to acknowledge it and turn it into a positive,” Wooten said.

However, training cannot prepare tour guides for some of the unpredictable questions and scenarios that unfold on tours. James Bridgeforth, sophomore political science major and GCSU tour guide, has officially been giving tours for a semester and he has already witnessed strange acts of incoming tourists.

“A lady brought her dog on a tour,” Bridgeforth said. “I looked up and the dog was just sitting there, panting,”

Bridgeforth said the woman had full intentions on taking the dog on the tour with her, but somehow found a babysitter for it at the last minute.

Wooten on the other hand has had a little more trying moments during her times as a guide, remembering one frightfully embarrassing moment while she was giving a tour of the library.

“I’ve been asked if porn was accessible on the computers in the library,” Wooten said. “(The question) was completely out of nowhere too, I wasn’t expecting it.”

Wooten scurried with an answer for the protective father spouting off facts about filters and library staff monitoring website usage.

“That daughter,” Wooten said. “She was so embarrassed.”

Wooten has also learned a few lessons while giving tour guides, such as making sure to mention there are, in fact, doors on the bathroom in residence halls.

“I forgot to mention that there were doors on the toilet and the shower rooms, so she walked in and she literally screamed,” Wooten said of one prospective student who was taking a tour.

Another close call Wooten remembers is when an unsuspected passerby crossed the tour’s path.

“I was walking between Wells (Hall) and the tennis courts and someone came out with a hookah,” Wooten said, “I was like ‘I’m sure that’s tobacco.’”

Among all of the frightfully awkward events that can occur during college campus tours, there also is a certain duty of the tour guides to showcase the essence of the college.

“I loved when I heard about smaller class sizes. For me, the larger class sizes terrified me,” Courtney Brown, a 17-year-old from Athens, Ga., said while on the tour.

When tour guides aren’t explaining mystery hookahs or clarifying porn usage to suspecting parents, what they’re really giving is a glimpse at an experience, an experience that offers more than random facts about the Governors Mansion or the fact that McIntosh House leans prominently to the right. Tour guides offer a chance for prospective students to see what lies at the heart of GCSU.

Posted by AubrieSofala on Nov 11 2010. Filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.