My favorite kind of tour

Today I gave a tour of the VTH.

There are good tours and there are bad tours. There are days when I am enthusiastic and excited to talk about my school, and days when I am tired or cranky or nervous.

There are all kinds of people on tours. There are knowledgeable, sometimes semi-annoying undergrads who are applying to vet school or have already been accepted. There are middle school girls with their rabid moms who want to know exactly what Susie has to do so she can get into vet school when she applies in 9 years. There are quiet people; there are gregarious people. There are people who laugh at my jokes and people who look at me like I'm from Mars. There are people who ask intelligent questions and accept "I don't know" as an answer, and there are people who do nothing but ask me detailed questions about large animal medicine.

Today's tour was my favorite kind:

• A polite high school senior who actually looked me in the eye and asked a couple questions
• His cute, well-behaved little sister
• His intelligent, non-rabid parents, both with a sense of humor and no experience in vet med

I sort of like it when they don't know too much about vet med, or medicine and science in particular, because then I don't get really complicated questions and nobody calls me out if I make a minor mistake while explaining something. However, I have also had some not-so-brilliant people who were confused even by my most dumbed-down version of things. These folks were right in the middle, where I like them to be.

So today made up for my last 3 tours: (1) A group including an intelligent, aggressive, large animal-oriented student who would not stop harassing me about large animal details; (2) A group including [completely randomly] one of my veterinary bosses from Arizona; (3) A group of 10 or so freshman vet students and their relatives, who asked me some questions I couldn't answer but stupidly tried to, making myself look like a complete blithering idiot!

Moral of the story: Good tours are good. (Yes, I am pretty eloquent on Friday afternoons.)