Getting to know a college campus can be a huge step for students attending university. Prospective students come from near and far to tour West Texas A&M University and all that it has to offer. However, with a pandemic going around the world right now, WTAMU has decided to start offering virtual tours so students may still get the Buffalo hospitality from the safety of their home.

According to WTAMU Admissions Page, “Experience our campus through our Virtual Tour the interactive experience guides you through our favorite parts of campus and features real students sharing their stories. Or, join our staff for a guided, real-time virtual tour experience every Tuesday at 2 p.m. CST.”

This is something completely new taking place with the Admissions Office still keeping the students best interest in mind with the circumstances that are taking place with COVID-19. Admissions set out on a mission to achieve the tour experience through a virtual standpoint.

“Yeah, so this is definitely new like we had never done this before prior to all of this.
So, of course of everything going on right now, and nobody’s allowed to be on campus and we didn’t want to take that away from the, you know, high schoolers, juniors or seniors that usually come and visit on campus. So we made the transition to go online and be able to provide a virtual experience for these students. So it’s completely new,” said Fabiola Hernandez, campus visit coordinator.

This hopefully will be something WTAMU would think of keeping for the future even when in-person tours do become available to work with every student and their specific needs especially when thinking of coming to WTAMU to study higher learning.

“Definitely hoping to keep this, because this one is a little more accommodating for the students, of course, you know, we get visitors from all over the U.S. and during the summer time we have people abroad that even come in toward campus. So if you know whenever we return, and people are still unable to make it to campus will be able to use this same what we do now and provide tours for people that just can absolutely not make the trip down here to tour,” Hernandez said.

Creating an online virtual tour was not an easy task to accomplish however, with the help of IT, this became a possibility. A team effort to help with this not so perfect scenario became a reality thanks to the Buff family always looking to help one another out especially in this time of uncertainty.

“Of course, this isn’t the ideal way to do it but it’s the only way and best way to do it. IT was a driving force of doing the you visit virtual tours, and they collaborated with us to basically get that together and get it going,” said Sedrick Knowlton, assistant director of admissions.

With everything going on it is nice to see that everyone is coming together right now to still give prospective students the Buffalo experience, through the screen of a computer.