THE BIG VISIT

435 families. 1200 people. 36 tour guides. Saturday morning starting at 8:30am. Yikes!

This is the essence of the big visit. The Office of Admissions is very ambitious...as they should be. Ohio University is a great school and people should hear about it. So in the Fall Quarter, the Office of Admissions has two big visit days, this time called Discovery Days. The premise is pretty simple: get a ton of prospective students to visit this beautiful campus and discover what it has to offer for them. For tour guides, it means being on top of your game at all times. You never know who is a prospective student and who is an OU student. It also means that your usual tour of 5-10 people could be as much as 35-40 people at any time. I know, sounds like fun. Well, it is.

After a 9am morning tour, it's on to the Welcome session inside Memorial Auditorium. The fun inside starts with President McDavis, pumping up the crowd with al the great stuff OU has accomplished in the past year. Then, we show the 3 Promise campaign commercials, which leads into 4 speeches from students (including yours truly) about how they discovered their promise here at OU. Once we finish a brief info session by OU Admissions, it's time to bring in the most exciting band in the land to cap it all off. Filling up the entire bottom of MemAud, the Marching 110 blasts out Stand Up and Cheer before we have the parents and students disperse to their respective academic info session.

Once we scurry all the prospective students to their respective locations, it's time for us to relax and recap the first part of our day. Lunch is time to unwind and that's exactly what we do. We know we have to because we've only finished one half of the day.

The second half begins with the Resource Fair inside Grover Center. What exactly is the Resource Fair? Well, it is a huge showcase of information from about 25 different organizations or colleges here at OU. The students and parents walk from one end of Grover Center to the other, gathering information that will hopefully help them in their college decision. For the tour guides, this means walk around, mingle with families and answer any and all questions. It can either be a fun time (if with the right family) or really boring when no one comes and talks to you.

Once the families have had a chance to walk around the tables, minlge, relax and have some popcorn, it's time to do more tours. So if families took a tour in the morning, they are free to leave whenever they like. Those who did not take the morning tour option take this option. So as the tour guides stand outside, the families walk out the south side of Grover Center and find a tour guide and leave. It looks like mass chaos but it's more of a controlled chaos. Once they find their guide, they are on their way.

Once the tour is done...so is the BIG VISIT. It truly is a tiring day that stretches from 8:30am to 3pm. It's up and down in terms of how hard we work the entire day but it definitely is a long day. A complete slideshow of the BIG VISIT is below. Watch and enjoy.