To best market the university, university ambassadors’ tours need to be accurate and show off more of the university’s assets.
University Ambassadors show off the University of Tulsa to prospective students; however, some of their standard tour lines should be updated or changed.
-The computers are not updated every two years, as UAs tell students. If they mean to say the operating system is updated every two years, say this, and honestly, most operating systems, like Windows, automatically update every so often. The physical computers have not been updated that often.
-Take tours into academic buildings. This should be tailored to the students’ interest, to see what place they’ll be spending the majority of their college career.
-There should be more than one showroom available. Currently, they only show Hardesty, which isn’t representative of most other dorms. The bathrooms for this dorm should also be kept cleaner. The communal bathrooms are also not cleaned twice daily.
-In training, there should be more emphasis placed on personal interaction and connection with students. If the tours are more one-on-one, as they are now, each tour should be more personalized to the students’ interest, not rote memorization.
-The gym is probably not built for a student population twice our size. Given that there’s only two squat racks and one Smith machine to do squats on, it’s quite unrealistic to believe 9,000 students or so could use that gym and be content.
-Allow prospective students to fill out a checklist of their interests so they can see more specific things on their tours. If a student is interested in seeing an apartment, they could check this off and see one on their tour.
-Don’t be afraid to talk about some of the negatives about campus or discuss how things on campus have improved. As someone trying to decide between graduate schools currently, I can promise students notice if the school has negatives, no matter how well UAs portray the school, and value honesty much more than hiding the truth.
-Don’t say each dorm has three levels of security. Hardesty, for instance, has the side door and your room door, only two levels of security, and for other dorms, the side doors may not always be locked.
