"Buy me!" -College

What struck me from the mediated artifacts was Siobhan's interpretation from the college brochures. High school students go out looking for the perfect school and they rely on these pieces of paper and their tour guides who are all looking to tell them the things they want to hear. I was a tour guide in high school and we were trained to tell each kid what they needed to hear for the school to be right. Don't get me wrong, I loved my high school experience but that being said, my school was not for everyone. On our tours we were taught to ask leading questions like "are you interested in the arts?", as we would approach the arts center so that we wouldn't drag on about a program a prospective student wasn't interested in. We would manipulate the image of the campus to make it fit like a glove for whatever kid stepped onto it. I could tell on some tours that certain kids wouldn't love it there as much as I did but if I had ever said that to them I would have gotten in so much trouble. My job was not to help a kid determine if the school was right for them but rather sell each kid a school that fit their needs, whatever those may have been. Even tour guides were picked strategically for prospective students, hockey players with hockey recruits and musicians with musicians; this way students could in a way see where they would fit into the campus. I guess what struck me most about Siobhan's main point was that after all the years of being a manipulator for a school, I still went out and looked at colleges as blindly as all the kids that came to me for tours and opinions. I asked people how they liked the school, listened to the speeches, and became enamored with the picturesque buildings. I had forgotten all about what a game these admissions processes really were. This is not to say at all that I feel I ended up at a terrible school but it served as a moment where I laughed at myself a bit, and realized I had been manipulated just as badly as I had manipulated through the years.