A misunderstanding over the pay rate for summer tour guides, coupled with the increased demands placed on tour guides this year, has lowered morale among some members of the program, admissions officers and students report.
During the Fall, Winter and Spring terms, student tour guides are not paid, as the admissions office wants students who are motivated to give tours out of excitement about Dartmouth rather than for more narrowly financial reasons, according to associate director of admissions Beth Onofry '02.
In the summer and in between terms, however, the admissions office has traditionally paid tour guides because there are fewer students available to give tours during summer terms. During the summer, the pay rate has traditionally been minimum wage, currently $6.25 per hour; during interim, when tour guides are even scarcer, pay is $8.00 per one-hour tour or $20 for two tours in one day.
But at the beginning of this summer, Onofry accidentally sent a BlitzMail message to all tour guides saying that summer guides would be paid at the interim rather than the traditional summer rate.
She alerted tour guides to her error quickly -- Onofry wasn't sure how long it took her, she said, perhaps about one or two days later -- but some students were still upset that they had already indicated when they'd be available to give tours to the admissions office.
"Some people would have wanted to scale back tours" had they known about the different wage, tour guide Jason Lau '05 said. He added, though, that this was not a problem for him personally, as he only gives tours on Saturdays this term.
Jill Harris '05 also found a different job this term and has scaled back to giving only one tour per week. She said, though, that it wasn't difficult to re-arrange her schedule. "I was able to resolve the issue on my own," Harris said.
Some tour guides have scaled back their tour schedules or dropped out of the program altogether, according to Onofry, some because of the financial issue.
Onofry could not give exact numbers and added that during any given term, some tour guides find themselves with less free time than they expected and ask to cut back their schedules temporarily. This shuffling of schedules has led to a general lowering of morale, according to Onofry and some of the guides.
Several tour guides mentioned getting BlitzMail messages daily asking for volunteers to lead "special tours," or groups of visitors not normally included in the tour schedule, and then hearing complaints about their unwillingness to volunteer to do these extra shifts.
"Tour guides aren't very good about volunteering to substitute for other people" when a guide is unable to lead his or her tour, Lau said.
The departures of several tour guides has also further increased pressure on the remaining guides to give yet more tours, Onofry said. It also means that the groups they do lead are sometimes significantly larger.
During the past year, the Admissions Office also started scheduling tours before information sessions, instead of afterwards as was previously the case, according to tour guide Serena Chang '05.
The reversed order means that tour guides "have to answer certain questions, e.g., what the D-plan is," that visitors previously learned the answers to during info sessions, Chang said.
It also means that tour guides have to be more careful about getting groups back to the Admissions Office by a certain time, she said.
During a meeting yesterday, the group discussed these issues and some ways of resolving them, including bonuses for extra tours and stepping up recruiting.
Onofry noted, however, that she cannot independently change students' rates of pay. She said, however, that she would relay their concerns to others in the Admissions Office.
While acknowledging the tensions of the past two weeks, most guides who spoke to The Dartmouth expressed enthusiasm about the program in general.
"I've been guiding ever since freshman winter, ever since I could," Harris said. "I do it because it's fun, because the people who run the program are fun and great."
"Nobody's out to get slave labor," she added.
