Secrets of Ivy League tour guides

Liz Lian:

In McCosh Courtyard on a sunny October afternoon, Princeton students mill about between classes while my friend Sybil, a junior, stands facing her Orange Key tour group. We smile and wave at each other over the heads of the thirty or so prospective students and their parents eagerly listening to Sybil. As I walk by, I catch a snippet of her presentation: “In general,” she says, “Princeton students aren’t really concerned with GPA.”

I laugh to myself at the absurdity of her comment. In a rigorous Ivy League atmosphere where students are divided into quintiles based on GPA cutoffs, how could this be true? I texted Sybil immediately after I heard her comment: “Stop lying to your tours!!” To which she responded: “They tell us to say that!”

Over lunch a few days later, Sybil—who, like all the other tour guides quoted in this article, agreed to be included on the condition that her real name not be used—lists several more pieces of exaggerated information she shares during her tours. She once begrudgingly told a tour group, “There’s no such thing as a typical or a bad dorm room” just one day after an incident that scarred her deeply. She had killed a large insect in her fourth-floor room, and when she returned to clean it up moments later, found a three-inch cockroach eating it. With a hint of bitterness, Sybil recalls a parent from another tour who asked her what the dating scene was like. “I said, ‘You can make it what you want it to be.’ Lie!” We both laugh. Some Princeton students do date, but Sybil is hinting at her frustration—shared by many of her peers—with ephemeral relationships that mostly blossom on “the Street,” the stretch of campus where most Princeton parties occur.