I know you took a bajillion college tours, and all of them sucked. Not boring-documentary sucked, but more like punch-yourself-in-the-face, Mariah Carey’s Glitter type of sucked. Your parents asked absurd questions about safety and class size while you tried to envision your pimply tour guide having any semblance of a social life. By the time this tour guide made the hilarious joke about “undecided” being the most popular major, you’d crossed this school off your list with no less than an hour of impersonal anecdotes and tweaked statistics to go.

You finally chose Cornell. Or, you know, maybe you didn’t choose Cornell, and it was either Ithaca or a year of daytime TV while you reapplied elsewhere. Regardless, on Spring Decision Day, you were probably less excited about what your admissions decision actually was than you were about getting the admissions decision website to load at all.

Right now, thousands of students are being faced with one of the biggest choices of their lives and have received acceptances to our fine institution (and, likely, other fine institutions). Their fates and futures must be signed, sealed and postmarked by May 1. This month, during the brilliant marketing scheme known as Cornell Days, these babies descended upon us by the thousands to mess up the flow of service at CTB and awkwardly say hi to us on the Arts Quad to see how friendly we are as a campus. For you, this was annoying, but for the students who make up Cornell University’s marketing machine, this was our time to shine.

O.K., before I keep writing I’m just going to give you some credentials here. I’ve been a Day Hall tour guide (Campus Information and Visitor Relations or CIVR) for three years now. I am president of the Hotel School Ambassadors (hotel school tour guides) and have a university-sponsored blog geared toward prospective students that many a Sun editorial in the past has called out as “sanitized tour guide babble.” Yes, in rereading the previous sentences I am disgusted with myself, but I prefer to think of it as University Public Relations rather than tour guiding just so I can scamper around and call myself the Samantha Jones of Cornell. Cute, right?

Anyway, the tour guides work their asses off at Cornell. We are one of the only universities to offer tours four times a day during the school week and one of the few to offer tours on Saturdays and Sundays. Yeah, we work on weekends. And on Slope Day. And in those traffic booths in the middle of the road, which might as well just have a neon signs that say “pissed about that parking ticket? Come bitch me out!” Our tours receive consistently glowing reviews from guests, due both in part to CIVR’s intense, three-round application and interview process for selecting new staff and the rigorous new-hire training.

Let’s discuss the art of giving tours. I tend to complain about things that most of the Cornell community thinks are easy, like cooking labs and hotelie prelims, but tours are hard work, people. An hour and a half of talking nonstop? Even the most annoying girlfriend I have — the one we all have, who talks about her boyfriend and her grades nonstop — gets worn out with incessantly babbling-her-face-off after one hour and eventually wanders home to watch her Grey’s Anatomy DVDs. Couple that whole mess with walking backwards in the presence of several breeds of ice and stairs that surprise you no matter how many tours you’ve given. Quite a challenge. Bonus round: good luck adhering to the CIVR dress code in the summer because your sandals are required to have a heel strap. Seriously, find me a cute sandal with a heel strap, and I will buy you diamonds. And don’t you dare approach me with Crocs.

The parents on tours are always the real treat, though. Every tour group has at least one parent who is savvy enough to have bought and read every single choose-the-right-college guidebook from their neighborhood Barnes & Noble. These parents are convinced that there is dirt to be uncovered and that if they approach the tour guide with the journalistic prowess of an Us Weekly reporter, they will somehow get her to open up about how daily life at this particular college is hell on earth and that her residence hall is actually a crack den. What do you expect when at the end of my smiley, pun-laden tour, you touch my arm and ask if I “ever get stressed here?” Lady, it’s snowing in mid-April, I have two prelims this week and the mall here has no Nordstrom. Get out of my face and go look at the Disney Institute. I’ll bet nobody ever gets stressed there.

Each member of the 80-person CIVR team devotes eight to 20 hours per week to giving awesome tours, manning the 254-INFO phone lines, working at the Day Hall front desk and staffing the parking information booths. During Cornell Days, we may see more than 1,000 tour guests in a single day. While everyone has been pointing fingers at all the negative PR Cornell has been getting in the last few weeks, this group of students has been doing a kickass job marketing the University to prospective students during this time — the busiest, most stressful part of the year for CIVR. I mean, you could have stopped your hot little fingers from writing your angry blog entries and mean comments on The Sun website for a second and applauded all the things that are going well for the University — applications are increasing; acceptance rates going down. We’re on our way to becoming the new “it girl” in Ivy League Hollywood (O.K., I’m sorry, that was a bad one).

So despite your best efforts to expose your asses to our tour groups on Ho Plaza and the occasional “let’s get blackout cause this place blows!” that gets screamed from somewhere on the Arts Quad, the statistics say that we, along with a lot of other people and organizations at Cornell, have been doing our jobs well over the past few years. And to my coworkers at CIVR: I salute you. Congratulations on another Cornell Days job well done.

Jenna Bromberg is a junior in the School of Hotel Administration. She can be contacted at jkb34@c­or­ne­ll.e­d­u. Fast Times at Statler High appears alternate Fridays.