‘The College Tour’ episode about UWRF now on Amazon Prime

The episode of the television show “The College Tour” featuring UW-River Falls has now been released on the Amazon Prime streaming service.

The episode follows 10 UWRF students as they tell their story while showcasing many different parts of the campus. While undergraduates who participated in filming of the show spoke positively of the experience, it is still too early to tell whether the show will drawn more attention from prospective students.

The show is hosted by Alex Boylan, who is known for winning “The Amazing Race” and has since gone on to be a producer and host of several different shows. Cathy Leaf, UWRF’s marketing specialist, said previously that the idea to participate in the college tour was first brought up by Chancellor Maria Gallo. She had participated in the show at a previous institution and thought the different marketing opportunities created by the show would be beneficial.

The students were directly involved in the production process with each cast member writing their own script.

“They kind of let me lead it (filming), so I got to pick the area we filmed, the horses we used, and kind of what would happen in the scenes,” said Greta Weix, a featured UWRF student.

The episode first premiered to students and the community in late January at a university event called Midnight Mayhem. The cast was all invited and received miniature Oscars as a thank you for participating.

Many of the featured students in the show had very positive responses. Isaac Roehrig, another featured student, said, “I think this is going to be really important to our out of state students.”

Samuel Peters stated, “I think it does a good job of just getting our name out there and showing all the various cool things going on around campus.”

Weix agreed: “I loved it, I think it was really well done and it was super cool to see everybody in it and how everybody experiences river falls in a different way in a different light and all the different types of students we have here because I’m only in (the College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences) so that’s all I interact with so it was really cool to see different departments.”

When asked about the show’s impact on admissions applications, Leaf said, “Well, I had a call with the admissions office and one thing about this project is that it kind of ladders up with a bunch of other projects that we are doing related to branding but admissions has noticed that the work we are doing. Not only this but in combination with the other branding awareness stuff, the billboards, all the other stuff that they can tell there is a difference especially in Minnesota.”

The only official number that the school has is from YouTube.

“Right now,” Leaf said, “our YouTube has had over 2,000 views of the whole episode.”