Tours offer first impression of campus

Student guide Jesse Kleinow gives potential students the deluxe tour of campus. Outreach, Admissions and Records is boosting its tour schedule to as part of efforts to recruit more students.

One of the most difficult tasks that senior Jesse Kleinow had to master as a campus tour guide wasn’t memorizing which buildings housed what departments. It was, rather, how to walk backwards while repeating it.

“It wasn’t easy and my calves ached for days when I started,” recalled Kleinow, who is in his third semester leading tours and is considered the University’s lead tour guide.

Campus tours have become more important and more popular than ever as a way of introducing prospective students and their parents to the campus and answering questions about what it is like to attend Sacramento State.

During the spring semester, the campus community may see even more tours taking place around the campus, as part of beefed-up efforts to recruit students. University Outreach, Admissions and Records which oversees the tour program, is sending e-mails to all students admitted for fall 2006 inviting them to come take a tour of the Sacramento State campus. “We feel that the tours might make the difference in influencing an admitted student to enroll in the University,” said Barbara Sloan, associate director of University Outreach Services.

The campus tour office conducts as many as a dozen tours each week during the fall and spring semesters. And tours are provided twice a month on Saturdays. During the recent fall semester, nearly 2,500 visitors to campus were escorted on tours by guides.

“Our tour guides are ambassadors for the University,” Sloan said. “New students and their parents often get their first impressions of the University from our tours.”

Sloan created the University’s tour program shortly after she joined the University in 1979. Before then the University had no formal tour program. She interviewed faculty and others on campus to find out about the history of the campus and what first-time visitors might want to know about it. Visitors, for example, would want to know about the Guy West Bridge and that it was named for Sacramento State’s first president.

The tour program was halted for several years as a result of budget cuts in the 1980s. In its place University Outreach Services offered visitors maps for self-guided tours, which visitors can still take. Renewed funding brought the program back after a two-year absence and it has been going strong ever since.

Today visitors to campus can request either an individual tour, which is actually a small group with about a dozen or so other visitors, or a group tour, which can consists of upwards of 100 students from nearby high schools. Visitors sign up for tours online at www.csus.edu/outreach.

“The tour guides do a great job,” said Kelly McRae, who is the University’s tour coordinator, supervising the work of four student tour guides. “They are welcoming to our visitors and they make them feel at home and comfortable.”

The tours, held rain or shine, last about an hour and hit the highlights of the inner campus such as the classroom buildings, the library and the University Union. A close-up look at Hornet Stadium would be a hike too far for most visitors, McRae said.

Student tour guide Kleinow has shown the campus to hundreds of visitors. He points out campus landmarks and offers running , and often, entertaining commentary. Placer Hall: Home of the U.S. Geological Survey. Eureka Hall: Location for the liberal studies program, one the largest in the state. Humboldt Hall: A building that houses 10 cadavers at all times for anatomy classes. And what does Mariposa Hall resemble? A cruise ship, he tells visitors.

During each tour Kleinow usually fields similar questions. Can freshmen have cars? (Yes) What’s parking like? (Tough but a new parking structure is under construction). What’s across the Guy West Bridge? (Lots of student apartments). For any questions that Kleinow can’t answer, he refers visitors to certain offices such as Financial Aid or Housing that can provide specific information.

“I have met alums who are returning with their children for tours. And I’ve met people from New York and from across the country,” said Kleinow, a criminal justice major who wants to go into law enforcement. “It has been a good experience for me working with people in groups because I was kind of shy in high school. It has been fun helping people get a good introduction to the Sacramento State campus.”

—Ted DeAdwyler