Campus tours are always happening around the Wayne State College campus all year round, and the tour guides called Navigators have a direct connection with future WSC students. According to the WSC website, Navigators are “the official student representatives of WSC”.
To be a Navigator, there are certain skills they have to possess in order to be successful in the job. Those skills include friendliness, enthusiasm for WSC, communication, time management, inquisitiveness and humility. Wayne State College Freshman Mariah McDole talked about having a “good Navigator” was one of the “big factors” that helped her decide if she wanted to go to WSC. WSC freshman Caden Neels also had some insight on how his Navigators influenced him to seek out WSC.
“I wanted more people to kind of enjoy the campus,” Neels said. “That’s one of the main reasons I actually chose Wayne. My tour guide when I first toured here was really great, so I thought that was a pretty great experience, and I was kind of hoping to pass that along to the next generation of students that would come here.”
Since Navigators are the first student the WSC hopefuls see, it poses the question: why are Navigators such a vital part of campus? They have a more “human touch” to help guide the incoming students to see why they would like WSC, according to McDole.
“The admissions team can set shoes out for incoming students; Navigators are the people showing them how to tie those shoes,” McDole said.
WSC junior Ava Hoffschneider has been a Navigator for two years now, and she has had a lot of experience giving these tours to incoming students. She also is pursuing an education degree, and she highlighted the different things that she loves about the job.
“I’m gonna be a high school teacher,” Hoffschneider said. “These are high schoolers coming to visit. It’s really a gift to be able to kind of talk through their options and make them more comfortable in whatever college they choose. And that’s kind of part of teaching too, just working with these students in that way. So I was like, you know what? This’ll be fun.”
Neels said being a Navigator and giving potential students their first impression of WSC is a crucial campus role.
“We have our upper management that kind of reaches out and invites them and tries to get them to come on campus, but we’re really the first experience, so I think that’s really important,” Neels said.
The campus tour Navigator has been a job title for a long time, and WSC will continue to hire more in the future to help bring in the next generation of students.
