When you take a campus tour, don’t be afraid to ask questions! You can learn a lot about a college from its website, but there’s no better source of information than a campus tour guide. That’s because most are current students, so they can give you an insider look at student life.
If you’re not sure what you should ask, here are some questions to get you started:
How do students find their friends on campus?
In college, you tackle new challenges in a new place. It’s important to find your community, because your friends help you take on college with confidence. So, ask your tour guide how students commonly make friends on that campus.
For a personal angle, you could also ask your tour guide how they made their own friends.
What is there to do on campus?
You’re not in class all the time! There’s plenty to do on campus and sometimes the hardest thing is figuring out where to start. That’s why you should ask your tour guide what people do for fun on campus.
Your tour guide was a new student once, too, so they’ve been through the same situation you’re in right now. While they probably don’t have absolutely every activity memorized, they’re an expert in how they made friends on campus.
How often do the school’s menus change?
You need to eat every day, so the food on campus means a lot. And even when you like a food, you can have too much of a good thing. Ask your tour guide how often the menus change to get a sense of the variety you’ll have.
Alternatively, you can ask for a few of your guide’s favorite campus meals. That gives you a better idea of how a current student thinks of the menus after eating them for more than a year.
What are the amenities in the residence halls?
Your residence hall is where you relax, rest, have fun and take care of everyday chores like laundry. Ask your tour guide what amenities are available in the residence halls, such as laundry equipment, study space, games or vending machines. That gives you a better picture of what your day-to-day life looks like there.
Plus, if you do go to that school, you’re better prepared to decide on what you need to bring with that information in hand.
What is one thing you wish you’d known before you started here?
No matter how much research you do about a college, there are always things that will surprise you. Your tour guide has been through the exact same experience, so make sure to ask them what they wish they’d known before they started college there.
You just might get a key piece of advice that you’d never considered before or get some insider knowledge that takes other students a while to learn, like where the best places to study or hang out are.