Ask a former campus tour guide to pick his single favorite UI landmark, and he’ll give you half a dozen.
“Altgeld bell tower, Alma, Krannert, Gregory Hall, the Morrow Plots and the Quad," says Google senior strategist Paul Stanton, a 2012 media studies grad and four-year guide. "On many of my tours, I saw friends and classmates and the prospective students always got a kick out of me saying hi to someone or running in to a classmate, sometimes literally; it made the campus feel so much smaller for those students — and for me, too.
"With a population of over 40,000 students, it can be easy to feel like a number when you’re on campus, but I’m so grateful for jobs like being a tour guide; for being a resident advisor and working with students their first year on campus; for professors and the dean, Jan Slater, in the College of Media; for organizations like the Student Alumni Ambassadors and the Illinois Leadership Center.
"Those groups really helped make the campus feel small and gave me plenty of stories for my tours."
