EdBoard: Why do we get upset by tours?

The Tartan Board

With the end of college applications, so begins the season of prospective students touring our campus. It seems like several times a day now, groups of students and parents wearing Scotty Dog and Kilt stickers roam the halls behind two Carnegie Mellon students dressed in spiffy red polos with microphones. Now, raise your hand if you get seized by a sudden urge to bang on the metaphorical glass and yell, “Don’t do it! Don’t come here! Turn back while you can!” While maybe it’s just a little funny to pretend to cry about 122 homework and getting food poisoning at The Underground in front of prospective students, what compels us to make this joke?

We so rarely interface with our university as a business; we rarely consider the fact that the school spends money on marketing and advertising in order to brand our experiences into a commodity. Our life in college, to a large degree, is the product Carnegie Mellon sells. And of course, there’s no room in the marketing campaign for our woes and suffering. Making a spectacle of our stress feels like the best way to counteract the way the university washes out the uncomfortable details of college life.

That isn’t to say the marketing is a lie. For many, coming to college represents an increase in freedom and its requisite increase in responsibilities. For many, it’s one of the most exciting times of their lives.

But everyone’s experience is subjective. If you are coming from someplace that you love a lot and Pittsburgh just isn’t cutting it for you, then of course you might feel trapped here. But maybe you didn’t like your hometown so much — or your hometown is Pittsburgh — and coming here is eye-opening and exciting.

The real reason that we love to hate our school is how much work we have — or, more accurately, how we balance our time.

While we may remember the glory days of a sub-50-unit first semester schedule, so many units and so many sleepless nights later, it is very easy to wonder if we would have enjoyed Penn State more. There are many, many nights where the amount of work feels overwhelming (enough to make you wonder if they’re really designed to help us learn, or just to keep the pressure high). This feeling certainly depends on a variety of other factors, but when you’re on the twelfth hour of your essay and a tour walks by, it’s really tempting to speak your truth.

It’s hard not to remember the images you were sold. It’s no coincidence that tours increase during Spring Carnival, or that the tour guide spiel focuses more on fun activities than schoolwork — the first year of college is just thirteenth grade, after all. You probably didn’t think about all the homework you’d end up receiving when you applied.

We are rightfully critical of our school’s work culture, but that shouldn’t obscure the good things about it. As each member of the EdBoard can attest, the students here have a good attitude and are always willing to help a friend out — something which we take for granted, but is perhaps not a guarantee at our peer institutions.

Maybe it’s funny to make a spectacle in front of tours (or at least, fantasize about how funny it would be if we did). But I think that if a prospective student approached us and sincerely asked us how we felt about Carnegie Mellon, we would tell them the whole story. We can always criticize what this school does wrong while remembering what a privilege it is to study.