Visiting Cal

Every Day's a Tour de Force

Nobody knows UC Berkeley like its 60 sharp-as-a-tack student tour guides. To see the sights and get the lowdown on the student experience, they offer the best 90 minutes in town

By Noel Gallagher

Bonnie Azab Powell photo

Spring 2005 | Sure you’ve seen the Campanile and Sather Gate. If you have a son or daughter enrolled here, you probably saw a dorm room during the chaotic blur that was Move-In Day.

But if you really want to get an insider’s peek at life at the University of California, Berkeley, put on your walking shoes. Daily 90-minute walking tours — or specially arranged private tours — wind through the heart of campus to provide a not-to-be-missed experience for both the Cal parent and the prospective Cal family.

“Everyone knows what an amazing place UC Berkeley is intellectually and academically,” said La Dawn Duvall, director of Visitor Services in Berkeley’s Office of Public Affairs. “But actually being here and seeing the campus through the eyes of a student is an experience one should not pass up.”

Almost 18,000 visitors took the daily tour last year, and another 15,500 visitors took specially arranged tours, many of them middle school or high school groups. Peak tour season is the summer, when families tend to go on college tours, and in April, right after campuses send out acceptance letters and graduating high school seniors are making their final choices.

But the busiest day by far is Cal Day, this year on April 16, when tours on foot and by trolley are offered nearly nonstop (see page 1).

Daily campus tours are led by undergraduates who are full of information, from enrollment facts and historical tidbits to personal accounts of what it’s like to go to school at Berkeley. The tours start near the West Gate and travel up the center of campus, past the soaring Eucalyptus Grove and beside Strawberry Creek. Along the way, the guides point out the sights while answering questions about campus life.

“In general, the top question is ‘What is class size going to be like?’,” said Michael Colvin, an infectiously upbeat guide who’s been leading tours for four years. On a recent tour that very question came up, and he described his own freshman year, when he had one class with 500 students and another with just five. Later, he arranged to have the group stop in a 400-person classroom to see what a large lecture is like.

Other burning questions from prospective students aren’t about classes — they’re about everything else: How do you find support in such a challenging academic environment? What are the dorms like? Is there time to do anything but study?

“I just tell them my own story: I have two jobs, I’m in a club, I teach a class, and I’m still an honor student,” said Colvin, an environmental economics and policy major who graduates in May. “You can do it. There are so many amazing opportunities here.”

For most visitors, tour highlights are the Campanile — which had 22,000 visitors last year — and historic Sproul Plaza, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement and the busy heart of the campus. Visitors are surprised to learn about the vast underground reach of Doe Library, where huge library stacks extend beneath nearby grassy Memorial Glade.

At some point during the tour, classes let out, and suddenly the visitors are swept into the campus’s lively network, in step with students and professors and surrounded by the everyday campus chatter. Usually, the tour ends at Sproul Plaza around lunchtime — another great chance to see the campus swirling in action as students gather around Ludwig’s Fountain, eat lunch, or browse the walkways lined with tables representing various student groups.

In addition to the standard walking tour, the campus regularly takes college-bound students on tours organized by their schools. Over time, the average age of these visitors has fallen; the campus today sees many more middle school groups, a reflection of the intense competition for admission to the university.

“On the tours, we make college sound really interesting and really fun,” Colvin said. “On a lot of these tours, the kids are potentially the first college-bound students in their family. It’s a responsibility we take very seriously.”

The roughly 60 tour guides understand that they are de facto ambassadors for the Berkeley campus, and their training is rigorous. There is an inch-thick binder crammed full of campus facts and historical data that must be memorized, and at mandatory monthly meetings they absorb the latest campus news. As a finale to their training, each has to give a personal tour to one of the Visitor Services experts — and get a winning review — before striking out on his or her own.

“It’s a wonderful and unique experience,” Colvin said of being a tour guide.

It’s pretty wonderful and unique for the visitors, too.