Summer Edition

Campus Is a Destination for Tourists as Well as Applicants

BY A. DUNLAP-SMITH

Thirteen-year-old Monica Villa from Houston enjoyed her Columbia visit so much that she wrote a letter of thanks to her tour guide, Jimmy Leung, GS'03: "Dear Jimmy, . . . It was cool. Well when I go to college I want to go there." And Cynthia Mejia, a seventh-grader also from Texas, poured out her enthusiasm for the school to her guide, Edward Lee, CC'99, by writing that "It was really neat seeing the statues and the buildings. My favorite thing was the cafeteria because it was so huge and pretty."

Though Monica and Cynthia are many years from becoming applicants, they and other visitors like them who are not applicants for undergraduate admission now make up the majority of the approximately 40,000 people who pass through the University's Visitors Center yearly. New York's recent popularity as a city both to live in and to visit has contributed to the rise not only in the number of prospective students coming to Columbia but also in tourists who simply want to see the school much as they would, say, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Visitors Center has consequently responded to the influx by becoming a multi-faceted information hub providing the kind of visit that more closely resembles The Met's in its thoroughness and sophistication than the staid and cursory campus tour of old.

"We want to personalize our visitors' experience of Columbia as much as possible," Angela Hoyte, co-director of the Visitors Center, says, "because we get more and more people coming in who want something other than a general tour of the campus." Visitors' requests range from directions to the Statue of Liberty to a personal tour in Arabic for the son of a Saudi dignitary. "We try to help everyone no matter what is needed," Hoyte says, "and with a little notice we can do it in just about any language--from Armenian to Urdu."

With that mission, the staff considers even the most incidental request as something of a personal challenge. Dimitri Portnoi, CC'01, who with Jonathan Galler, CC'00, is a co-chair of the Center's undergraduate tour-guides program, tells of a visitor who wanted nothing more than the answer to a single question: How high is the dome that tops Low Library? When the information could not be found in the Center, a staffer was dispatched to the University archives to dig it out. A little while later the visitor descended the Low steps with her answer: 105.5 feet.

Feeling the pressure of an increasing flow of visitors to the campus in the early '90s, Columbia moved its overburdened Visitors Center in June 1993 from Dodge Hall to its present, roomier location in 213 Low, off the foyer inside the building's main entrance. It was tastefully decorated with wood panelling, plush carpeting and deep, comfortable chairs to present a warm and a welcoming impression of the school, especially to often-overawed prospective students and their parents. Now Hoyte and her colleague Jodi Buyyounouski, who directs visitors' services for the prospective undergraduate applicant pool in grades 10-12, have added a portable CD player. The Beatles and Mozart help create, Hoyte says, "an even more relaxed and home-type mood in the Center."

The new Visitors Center in Low wasn't opened too soon. Buyyounouski reports that the number of visitors from grades 10-12 alone rose nearly 100% from 1995-1998 to more than 17,000. Visits by all other persons accelerated as rapidly, to reach above 22,000 also by the end of last year. And just for this June visits by non-prospective college students jumped 94 percent ahead of the previous June. The Center estimates that at the present rate of traffic more than 45,000 visitors should pass through its doors by the end of 1999.

The underlying explanation for the University's popularity among prospective students and tourists alike is New York City's improved reputation and Columbia's stepped-up marketing efforts. But Hoyte points out that "Travel agents refer their clients to us because, with sites of historic and cultural value on the campus and in the neighborhood, they know that this is an area worth coming to see and that Columbia's Visitors Center gives tours--and the tours are free." The University as well as Morningside Heights are also listed in many prominent guides to the city, such as Fodor's, Time Out and Lonely Planet.

For prospective applicants, the Visitors Center can schedule enough activities to keep them busy almost all day and into the night: from information sessions of both a general and a specific kind to tours of the whole campus or of just one building to classroom and lab visits to meetings with professors and students right up to overnight stays. Before the twice-daily undergraduate tour, the Visitors Center gives an hour-long information session during which a packet is handed out containing maps and booklets and a tour evaluation form.

The evaluation form Galler says is essential to the constant bettering of the tours that his guides provide. "People write only if they feel strongly one way or another. If we get a bad evaluation, we fix the problem. But recently we've received evaluations like 'much better than three years ago [when I was here with an older son],' so we know we're on the right track."

To accomodate visitors, the student guides will go so far as devising impromptu itineraries. On a day during one of this summer's heat waves, Portnoi came up with an "AC Tour of Columbia" to keep his group out of the sun and in the best air-conditioned buildings on campus. As they left, the members of his grateful group thanked him and told him that they had traveled to Princeton earlier that day only to find that the school had cancelled its tours because of the heat.

For guides needing ideas to keep a group of youngsters interested, the Center has a list of "Pretty Wacky and Wild Things To Do On an All-Kids Tour." Items on the list include finding the owl on the statue of Alma Mater, eavesdropping on conversations at the Whispering Bench, spinning the Henry Moore sculpture commonly known as "The Tooth" on Revson Plaza and trying to pronounce the names chiselled into the entablature of Butler Library. Many of these stops are also a part of the other Visitors Center tours, including its "Self-Guided Tour" brochure for those wishing to explore the campus on their own.

Even those who wander into the Center inadvertently are unlikely to leave without some University pamphlet or info. sheet in their hands. Table tops and counters and even window sills are covered in hand-out literature about Columbia and Morningside Heights: from department flyers to the Columbia Journalism Review and from the undergraduate paper, The Spectator, to the Morningside Alliance's foldout guide to the neighborhood.

With all the information it makes available to the public in every possible medium, the Center is nevertheless constantly at work improving what it offers and gathering more. That leads Hoyte and Buyyounouski to worry that a visitor may come to feel overwhelmed. But with evaluations such as "yours is the best information session and tour in the Ivy League," they have yet to lose a night's sleep over it.