May 15, 2008
A fan of university campuses, Blume’s a perfect fit for this job
When Grant Blume goes on vacation, he seeks out the nearest college and arranges to take a campus tour. It may seem like a busman’s holiday for Blume, who’s in charge of the UW’s campus tours, but in fact, he’s been doing it since way before he began working for the University a year ago.
He was a campus tour guide in his undergraduate years at the University of Oregon, he explains, and he loved it so much that he’s been taking campus tours ever since. Then, while working as an admissions counselor for his alma mater, he saw the UW’s job announcement — an opening for a senior admissions counselor and coordinator of campus visits. Blume knew the job was perfect for him, and his year of experience has confirmed that.
“I really feel like I have one of the best jobs on this campus because I work with the tour guides, so I’m keyed in to what students are doing,” Blume said. “I get to hear about their lives and their classes. Then I also work with high school students who are so excited to get here. That’s the bridge at admissions that I love.”
One of the things Blume has done since his arrival is rev up tour guide recruitment and training. The University offers two tours every weekday and one on Saturday, so it needs a team of at least 20 student tour guides. Blume put up recruiting posters all over campus and arranged to talk to large lecture classes in an effort to increase the applicant pool. The result was 80 applicants, compared to 20 in previous years. From that group, 23 were hired.
Blume has introduced more training too. “In the past we just talked about buildings,” he said. “Now we have a booklet for tour guides and we’re trying to standardize the information. So tour guides know that when they’re in Red Square they talk about Kane Hall, but then they also talk about class size — the average is 35 students — and the fact that we have Freshman Interest Groups. When they’re in Mary Gates, they talk about undergraduate research and the career center and the gateway center.”
Blume goes along on tours some of the time to observe his guides in action.
Another of Blume’s projects this year was expanding the program called Husky Experience, which brings to campus high school students who have been accepted to the University so that they can see what it would be like to be a student here. Blume arranged for online registration that allowed students to choose which experiences they were most interested in having so they could create a customized experience. Offerings included a tour of a residence hall, a student panel, several academic sessions in a variety of subject areas, a library tour, etc.
“We did a survey afterwards and got a lot of great feedback that peer institutions our size haven’t offered the choices we did,” Blume said.
Despite his long-term interest in campus tours, Blume didn’t always aspire to his current career choice. As the first in his family to go to college, he majored in business and geography, and said he thought he wanted to work in a corporate environment making lots of money.
“Then I got my wish and went to work for Johnson & Johnson,” he said. “I was miserable. After a couple of years I found my way back to higher education.”
Now he’s enrolled in the Evans School of Public Affairs for the fall and hopes to work his way into an administrative role in Student Life.
But in the meantime he’s content, just knowing he’s been helpful to prospective students and their parents. “I’m lucky to work for bosses who say, ‘Don’t sell people on the UW. Give them information that’s useful,'” Blume said.
“I love it when students come to campus and say that visiting really helped. Sometimes it helps them realize they want to come here and sometimes they say, ‘This place isn’t for me.’ But whatever they say, I have the satisfaction of knowing that our program really made a difference.”
