At the OSU Welcome Center, tour ambassadors are the first people many prospective students and their families meet on campus, and they strive to provide an authentic first look at the university so visitors can decide whether OSU is the right fit for them.
Behind the scenes, the staff who supervise these student workers are committed to ensuring they find success themselves throughout their years at OSU, both personally and professionally.
“To me, student employment is a great retention piece of higher education,” said Welcome Center Director Natalie Rooney. “To keep students enrolled, a lot of things have to work together: Students have to be able to afford college and they have to have support and people in their corner. Student employment is a really compelling way to retain students.”
The Welcome Center is a coveted job for student workers at OSU, with many staying in the position for two or three years, Rooney said. New hires start each winter, then complete intensive training during spring term so they can start leading tours by summer. The center typically employs around 50 students.
Student workers in Newport for a day of staff training.
The center sees about 34,000 campus visitors a year and offers multiple 90-minute campus tours each weekday year-round, while also connecting visitors with individual colleges’ tours. Inside the center (located within the new side of Reser Stadium) visitors can attend presentations that explain the admission and application process in more detail. The center hosts group tours on request along with large day-long admissions programs, and also offers tours for OSU employees, especially new or prospective hires who want to learn about campus.
Tour ambassadors lead groups of eight to 10 families on a route that includes stops at Reser, the Memorial Union and several cultural centers, while talking about the different colleges as well as housing and dining options, clubs and recreational activities. They encourage visitors to speak up and ask questions while walking between stops, and they don’t follow an exact script; rather, they have a list of talking points to hit and are encouraged to make the tours their own.
“Being able to work on my public speaking skills has really helped me, especially with presenting research,” said tour ambassador Gabe Jurado, who’s entering his senior year at OSU and third year leading tours with the Welcome Center. “This last year, I was also helping with hiring and training new hires, so I have a lot of experience that will definitely help me in my career.”
Welcome Center staff are intentional about the supportive atmosphere they create within the office, Rooney said. It’s one of the center’s newly established strategic goals, which she spearheaded last fall to more explicitly align their work with Prosperity Widely Shared.
“What that looks like for us is thinking about what training we provide our students, what kinds of support. How do we invest in their success so they can stay here and graduate?” Rooney said. “All of that is contributing to every student graduating. They’re people first, students second and student employees third.”
In practice, Rooney said, that involves simple things like greeting students every day when they come on shift, offering schedule flexibility, asking about their lives, remembering when they’re cramming for exams and even showing up to their intramural games or Honors thesis defenses.
All that support has “raised the bar” for his future employers, said Jurado, who is studying oceanography.
“I really just love being in the role,” he said. “Our staff are super understanding. And all the other student ambassadors are so welcoming and so nice. We have a really positive working environment.”
The center has tour ambassadors representing all of OSU’s colleges, a variety of states and countries, rural areas and communities like first-generation college students, students from low-income backgrounds and students of color.
Each year, the demographics of current and prospective OSU students change, and Rooney says the Welcome Center wants to stay relevant to the communities they’re seeing, rather than having 50 ambassadors who all study the same subject or come from the same hometown.
Jurado is part of the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians and he tries to be the one leading tours for visitors with Indigenous backgrounds — even when he’s off the clock, he gives tours to students who visit campus with the Siletz Tribal Youth Council, which he’s a member of.
“A lot of those students coming from different reservations and backgrounds just don’t have a lot of access to this, or they don’t know that college is an option,” Jurado said. “It’s a way to highlight what I’m doing so other students can be inspired, and so they can see themselves in me.”
