I’m not into voyeurs. I don’t broadcast my life through reality television and I don’t post my life on the Web for anyone with an Internet connection to follow. I’m not interested in having strangers study me. But most importantly, I hate being a part of the campus tour.
Evidently UCLA students are some sort of zoo creature that is fascinating in its natural habitat. Prospective students and their parents love unabashedly staring at you as you’re just living your normal day-to-day life. They think they’re not an interruption but they are. Getting caught behind them is like being caught behind someone standing on an escalator when you’re trying to use it as a warp speed staircase. It makes you want to violently push through them and yell, “You don’t even go here!” ““ or maybe I’m the only person who wants to do that.
When I see the tour groups anxiously waiting to soon find out that they’ll need a StairMaster as well as good grades to truly succeed at this school, I have to resist the impulse to act as their tour guide.
You know how funny the little boys in “Slumdog Millionaire” are when they give unassuming foreigners fake tours? That could be me.
I’d take the most roundabout route and make up facts that are clearly false all while answering their questions either incorrectly or blowing them off entirely.
It’s terrible, I know, but that’s just where my mind goes when I see those small, non-threatening mobs.
I could mess with them, and they wouldn’t even know I was messing with them. It would be funny ““ I mean wrong. No, it would be funny.
While I overhear the tour guides saying things like, “That was a good question. For those of you that didn’t hear, she asked how long students usually live on campus for. …” all I want to do is start walking with the tour group and ask questions to the guide. I want to tell the other prospective students that I’m a member of Mensa and spend most of my free time either teaching special-needs children to ride horses or training with my Junior Olympic gymnastics team. Oh, and I invented OxiClean.
Dahlia Wahab, a first-year political science student who gives campus tours to potential athletes, said the tours are typically fairly slow-moving.
However, it’s not the athletes I’m worried about. They take individual tours, making the size of their human wall much smaller, and they’re typically a fairly swift bunch.
Sometimes I like to think that I’m observing them instead of the other way around. For example, the ones in running shoes like to be up in front. Many carry mini-backpacks. High school students are awkward around their parents.
OK, so my observations aren’t brilliant, but I’m not the one who needs to have someone narrating my surroundings while I walk.
Zach Pennington, a third-year psychology student, finds the tour groups amusing. He said, “I love them. I always make really off comments. Or I’ll be smoking.”
One person’s pain is another’s pleasure. If you don’t think about holding an inappropriate conversation or doing something generally frowned upon by society, then you have no sense of humor. It’s more passive-aggressive than calling out which high school students you’d like to have on campus and which ones you hope don’t grace your sight ever again.
Campus tours wouldn’t be so annoying if they weren’t during times when the campus is already crowded. Take your leisurely stroll down Bruin Walk on a weekend. Stop to watch the squirrels eat muffins out of the trash cans on a Saturday.
I understand that taking a tour of potential colleges is important for applicants and admits, but if they’re going to barricade off the entrance to the library at noon on a Tuesday, it’s a problem.
Come back when it’s convenient for everyone ““ or load up on one of those Disneyland trams so you can be quick and compact.
We’re not characters in an amusement park; don’t ask us to pose with you in pictures, don’t take candid shots and don’t ask for autographs in your UCLA notebook from the student store.
If you’d like Jagerman to give you her version of the campus tour, then e-mail Jagerman at