Giving Tours

As part of my "internship" in College Counseling here at school, I am sometimes asked (usually at the last minute) to give tours to university representatives. My tours usually show the auditorium, the library, one entrance of the sprawling academic complex, the dining hall, and sometimes the dorms and athletic facilities. Every representative asks different questions but they almost all ask about the make-up of the student body and faculty. Now you'd think I would have asked someone for an official percentage, but I'm still answering these questions with my guess that "most" of our students come from Amman and that "about half" of our teachers are American. These are the answers I gave to our most recent visiting representatives. However, these representatives were from universities but from an American, after-school program called Single Planet Immediately. (I’m using synonyms so the Google police won't find me). SPI is a Seattle-based after-school program that seeks to provide low-income students with an international perspective and with opportunities to attend college. SPI teaches Arabic and Chinese after school twice a week, runs, summer camps, and awards scholarships to motivated students. SPI has been called one of the most innovative and successful after-school programs in the country (by Time Magazine I think). Anyway, these three representative and one of their students are touring the Middle East because their looking for potential partners with whom they can create study abroad programs for their students. From my understanding, nobody here at school really knows how we could help with that but we've at least had a chance to meet now. S'anyways, I actually gave these representatives a tour along with another JF. I think the school may have asked two junior fellows to give this tour because these representatives said that they're trying very hard to promote the gap year idea for their students. I'm guessing that our representatives got really excited when we told them that our gap-year program is almost entirely all expenses paid. It was hard to tell though because they were pretty much excited the entire time since they only had twenty minutes to tour the campus before they had to leave for Amman. Some highlights of the tour were when they asked each of us to promote the gap-year experience on camera and when my colleague made me lock elbows with her and "frolic" across a stretch of grass (the rules technically say you have to if you walk on the grass). I think our representatives especially liked seeing that because I'm pretty sure I saw one of them filming us when we were ahead of them. I'm not sure what's going to come as a result of SPI's visit, but it was a fun tour and they were all really nice people.