I think I actually fell only once; not bad considering the number of backward miles I walked on campus.

A BACKWARD LOOK In the summer and fall of 1992, I was a tour guide at UC Davis. I loved my job. More than anything I loved showing the campus to prospective students and their parents. I was proud to be an Aggie and proud of the campus, and wanted to encourage visitors to choose Davis over the other less open, less friendly UC campuses. I'm not sure how effective I was at that goal, but I had fun trying. One of the most challenging aspects of being a tour guide involved walking backward through the entire campus. Part of the challenge was learning to say "On your left you will see . . ." while pointing with my right hand. The Davis campus made the backward walks especially tricky, given the number of bikes parked on the sidewalks. On more than one occasion, the tour group members had to warn me instants before I tripped over bike pods or bikes. I think I actually fell only once; not bad considering the number of backward miles I walked on campus. Tour guides come in two types, for those of you who have never gone on an official UC Davis tour. There are the walking tour guides (that would be me) and the guides who are willing to stick their necks out and ride around campus on a tram, speaking into a microphone to groups of 30. The tram jobs scared me, because everyone within a 100-yard radius of the tram could hear everything you had to say. Also, the tram tours seemed less intimate, less personal, a less satisfying way to show off the campus. However, one time I gave in to the tour director's desperate request that I give a tram tour for a group of high school students visiting the campus for the day. Halfway through the tour, their teacher came up to me and said, "You really don't need to tell them so much about the campus. Most of them are exchange students and don't understand a word you are saying." So much for foreign relations. From that day on, I refused to give another tram tour. During tour guide training, I learned all kinds of interesting UC Davis trivia, including stories about square tomatoes (machine pickable!), fruit roll-ups and fruit cocktail, cows with holes and biking-under-the-influence tickets. But I think I learned more from the guests I showed around campus. They confirmed my suspicion that my parents weren't the only ones who were overly concerned about dorm life. Invariably, each tour included at least one parent who believed the bathrooms were coed, another who was convinced their child's computer would be stolen right off the desk and one more who had heard the dorm food was the most horrendous slop ever dumped on a plate. None true, of course, except for maybe the bad dorm food. I learned from the prospective students that they took their studies more seriously than you would expect of high school seniors. Most wanted to hear more about the libraries, the class sizes, availability of professors and where they could get the best pizza delivered late at night during cram sessions. What I remember most about the Davis visitors, though, was not their interest in dorm or academic life. It was, instead, the way their enthusiasm for UC Davis reflected my own. I think it must be hard to spend any time in Davis and not be charmed by the down-home feeling it projects--the water towers, the fact that the tallest building is a mere nine stories, the way people stop to help you find your way when you're lost, the dachshund races on Picnic Day. I'm sure the current tour guides are still lauding the same UC Davis virtues that I used to and that the new campus visitors are still excited by the possibilities afforded by a great university in a small town. -- Jean Protsik '93