Scoring Proposals, Trips to China

As a tour guide for Unofficial Tours, Inc., the saavy Harvardian could earn $12 per hour. As a tour guide for the Crimson Key Society, students work for free. In exchange, though, they receive perks as valuable as unsought dating advice, marriage proposals, and international travel.

Though the Crimson Key Society’s policy prohibits soliciting tips, that doesn’t prevent some fortunate Keysters from scoring cash, gifts, and the occasional experience of a lifetime.

Perhaps the luckiest tour guide is Jason B. McCoy ’08. He gave a tour to a group from the SIAS University in China, who wanted McCoy to speak about education at Harvard and graduate work, despite the fact that he was 20 at the time.

In return? McCoy received a ten-day, all-expenses-paid trip to China in October 2005. He spent three days being escorted by SIAS students around Beijing and seven days at the University in Xinzheng.

“I got the chance to eat dinner in their Great Hall, which is like their White House, with a few heads of state,” says McCoy. “[The trip] was the most amazing experience I’ve ever had.”

But it isn’t just Chinese academics who’ve been wowed by their tour guide.

“I was given a business card and offered a scholarship to the University of Dubai,” writes Matthew S. Roller ’08 in an e-mail, “if I ever happened to be in the area.”

And another tourist from the Chamber of Commerce in Vietnam bestowed a gift-wrapped plaque upon Keyster Maura A. Graul ’07.

Often these exchanges are awkwardly personal. James H. O’Keefe ’09, also a Crimson editor, was interrogated by a tourist about his love life.

“By the end I felt naked and raw,” O’Keefe writes in an e-mail.

Perhaps a consequence that no gift, no matter how life-changing, can remedy.