Expanding Access: USU Students Help Launch Spanish-Language Campus Tours

LOGAN, Utah — Utah State University conducts tours of the Logan campus multiple times a day, Monday through Friday, throughout the year, rain or shine.

So the crowd gathered outside USU’s Big Blue Room in the Taggart Student Center last month could have easily been mistaken for a group of prospective students waiting to learn more about everything the university has to offer — from academic programs, student life and recreational facilities to USU’s famous Aggie Ice Cream.

But this group was different. In place of parents, USU Admissions staff Annette Vazquez-Torres and Assistant Professor of Translation and Interpretation Sofía Monzón Rodríguez accompanied a group of current USU students eager to see their work deftly executed by tour guide Miles Croshaw.

“When I volunteered, I'm not going to lie, I did not know that this is what I was doing,” he said.

Students in Monzón’s legal and business translation course adapted a Logan campus tour into Spanish, and this April, Croshaw stepped up to the challenge of helping them test their project.

“I'm definitely not the best Spanish speaker, but I'm glad I had the opportunity to get the script a little bit early and start working on it,” said Croshaw, who led a 75-minute mock tour so Monzón and her students could listen along, make tiny revisions as they went, and ultimately create a model USU Admissions can adopt for future use.

According to Vazquez-Torres, assistant director for Access & Multicultural Engagement, many institutions in the state already offer college tours in Spanish — something USU had previously explored as well. She was one who initially approached Monzón about the possibility of having current students help create a Spanish-language version for USU.

Out of 120 current ambassadors — students like Croshaw chosen to help represent Utah State University at admissions events and on-campus tours — “20 to 25 … speak Spanish natively or via experience … more than ever before,” said Vazquez-Torres, who saw “a great opportunity” to partner with USU’s translation and interpretation programs.

Despite having a script in hand, Croshaw made every effort to conduct the tour as naturally as possible, engaging with his audience, asking them questions, and even stopping to chat with students he encountered along the way. And the only difference from every other tour he’s ever given in Logan? This one was entirely in Spanish, even when he waved to address others he knew on campus.

Students in the legal and business translation course were assigned pages from the entire USU tour script. This way, several students could focus on specific sections of the document and take ownership of the areas assigned.

A finance major at USU, Kayson Hertzler, said he enrolled in the course to gain skills applicable to providing resources to Spanish speakers in a business context.

“We learned a ton of different things about words, and, I mean, just about the university,” Hertzler said.

Jacob Miller, another student translator in Monzón’s class, enjoyed the hands-on aspects of the project and was excited to see it come to life.

“It's … just an amazing opportunity to see how big of an impact this will really have because we know there are a lot of people in the valley, a lot of people who come to visit who don't speak English, a lot of parents,” he said. “It just feels good to know that those ambassadors aren't going to have to work so hard to try to think of something that might make sense … We did something that should be able to be pretty universally understood.”

Both Miller, who learned Spanish in Colombia, and Hertzler, who learned it in Mexico, have decided to pursue the Legal and Business Translation Certificate. The program is currently open to students with advanced proficiency in both English and Spanish.

Vazquez-Torres said USU has plans to begin offering Spanish-language tours on a limited basis but will continue growing the program to meet the interest of prospective students and their families.

“It'll make a huge difference moving forward in our ability to provide language access to Spanish-speaking families, most importantly parents, right?” she said, addressing the group at the end of the tour.

And to make sure the experience felt even more real for the mock participants, Vazquez-Torres ended the day by handing out Aggie Ice Cream coupons, acknowledging that these were a “super small” thank you in exchange for all the work the student translators had done.

Hopefully, this work will be even more meaningful for the next group of students and parents who take part in a Spanish-language tour at USU.

“When parents come with their students, often they're kind of left in the dark and aren't entirely sure what their kid is getting into, how they can best support them,” Vazquez-Torres said. “So, this is really going to provide just a piece of the puzzle that hopefully we can continue to grow and provide as much access to our prospective students and their families as possible.”

For more information about Utah State University campus tours, please visit https://www.usu.edu/admissions/campustour.