Admissions Office Limits Today’s Campus Tours to Mediocre Students

Undergraduate Admissions director Mary Donovan announced today that all campus tours will include only students who probably will not gain admission into Dartmouth anyway. This measure has been introduced in an effort to to acknowledge the futility of standing in the midst of falling snow in late April and telling people they should choose to live this miserable life for four long years.

In a blitz sent out to tour guides that was obtained by the Dunyun, Donovan explained, “Please don’t bother to try convincing these students and their parents that Dartmouth is the right place for them. It’s a pretty safe bet that none of the kids you potentially see today—on what my Google calendar insists is ‘April 21st,’ a month into spring—would ever be able to pay attention to anything other than the inexplicable snow flurries and the biting wind surrounding them. They will never be able to hear your pitch on our superior dining halls over the clanging metallic sound of regret in their heads at having worn flip-flops. It’s just not worth it. Furthermore, it’s doubtful that any of them have already been granted admission yet, since they would have come during that farce we call Dimensions last weekend. Don’t waste your time, and hopefully they won’t waste ours with another stale, recycled essay about feeding orphans in Ghana. We saw your Facebook picture, generic white girl. We get it.”

Most tour guides have shown enthusiasm for this idea, mostly because they only speak in enthusiastic tones at all times. Sandy Brooks ‘13, who meets the unwritten “pretty but not-too-pretty” tour guide requirement, agreed with the reasoning behind the decision: “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought to myself, I just wish I didn’t have to waste my cutesy story about me and my friends having picnics on the Green on this group of shivering and bewildered Californians in the sleet. Sometimes people literally roll their eyes at me. A couple of days ago some girl who was still here from Dimensions asked me if the temperature was another trick. Yeah, dumbass, like the sun’s going to pop out from behind the clouds wearing a ‘Dartmouth Grandma’ t-shirt and melt this godforsaken tundra into habitable green space.”

For Brooks and others like her, today marks a break from their daily pathetic attempts to deceive promising students into believing that Dartmouth is the place for them despite nearly year-round snowfall. According to Donovan, because tours will only be open to students with below-median SAT scores, a maximum GPA of 3.7, and generic extracurricular activities including but not limited to “helping out at nursing homes, babysitting, feeding the homeless, and soccer,” the admissions office hopes both to curb the number of mediocre applications they are forced to read each year as well as reduce the mental stress of tour guides who typically must make petty jokes about the weather while silently wishing they could set themselves on fire.

Though the admissions office typically focuses on convincing students to apply to and attend the college, the strain of putting Dartmouth in a positive light while standing outdoors given its obvious climatic shortcomings has driven some to the brink of collapse. Arthur Bethel ’12 laments, “I don’t know if I can get through one more tour seeing the miserable looks on the faces of those girls who stupidly wore skirts. I can just see the incoming freshman class getting frumpier before my eyes. And the complaints! How do you think I feel? This is my job EVERY DAY. I feel like I’d have a higher success rate convincing people I’m an African prince who will pay them one million dollars if they wire me thirty thousand first. I LIVE A LIE.”

The admissions office has also instituted a new policy that anyone who asks a tour guide a question regarding their favorite or least favorite thing about Dartmouth will be automatically denied admission without anyone having read their application, because as Donovan explains, “We've all read it before."