courtesy media.cleveland.com

What a Girl Wants

While open houses mean the dining halls will be overtaken by awkward prospective students and intrusive parents, they also mean early starts and long days for me. As a tour guide, they provide the perfect opportunity to work a lot and start to pay off my spring-break trip.

After last week’s two-day open house and prospie overnight, I can officially say I love open houses. Despite walking through the snow before sunrise to get to Thwing by 7 a.m. and begin unloading boxes of pamphlets in the dark atrium, I was eager to wake up each morning.

If you haven’t spent some time talking to a prospie and their family then you are missing out. Their energy and interest in Case Western Reserve University is palpable; you can’t help but be infused with their eagerness to experience all that CWRU has to offer.

So I am more than happy to mix and mingle throughout the Thwing Atrium: asking lonesome prospies how their overnight stay was and clarifying the schedule of events for confused parents. They either smile and politely deny your advances, as they are already on top of the day and have a feel for CWRU, or they quickly engage you in discussion, pressing you for your knowledge of all our school has to offer. This is the fun part.

Through these interactions with prospies and their families, I get to divulge the best-kept collegiate secret that is CWRU. I share my experiences, typical experiences, and the experiences of my friends in an attempt to sum up campus life.

Families ask about professors, study spaces, the anomaly that is Cleveland weather, roommates, dining halls, internships, research, course load, extracurricular, study abroad, majors, minors, the college transition, and of course, the students running around in green bandanas with nerf guns. My favorite question to receive was also my favorite question to ask way back when I was a prospie: why did you decide to come to CWRU?

Through this question and every other question asked, I am provided the opportunity to reflect. I might be stressed out from housing drama and worn down by piles of homework, but when I am with families all I have to do is think about what makes our school great.

When I am interacting with families I am reminded of all the wonderful opportunities and resources CWRU presents and they overwhelm the negative aspects.

Families are genuinely excited to be on campus and interested in soaking up as much as possible. The college decision process is daunting, no doubt, but inevitably it is thrilling: prospies are deciding their future. And the possibility that I could somehow positively affect that decision and the degree of impact that I, as a tour guide, make upon a prospies visit to campus encourages me even more so to highlight the wonderful aspects of our campus.

At the end of a day spent tour guiding and mingling, I happily churn through my homework, relishing the opportunity to study at such an exceptional institution. We, the CWRU student body, are truly blessed with many opportunities, from Seth Meyers to groundbreaking research, but we easily forget this in the day-to-day, week-to-week exhaustion of homework and exams. Sometimes all it takes is a lost prospie to remind us of our exceptional school.

Heather O’Keeffe is a first year student studying biomedical engineering. She spent spring break wandering the streets of New York City and navigating the subway like a local.