After a long day at work, coming home to your significant other to talk about your short-tempered coworker or an obnoxious customer can feel like an elephant-sized weight off your chest. Typically, they’re not there to see your snarky comment or exaggerated eye roll, meaning they’ll ideally take your side immediately. 

For senior business administration major Ashley Parke, that coworker sitting at the adjacent desk cracking jokes to the other employees is her boyfriend, Cooper Scott, a senior strategic and corporate communication major. 

Parke and Scott work alongside each other at Chapman’s Office of Admission, where they answer phone calls, interview prospective students and give campus tours to interested families. 

But this isn’t where their relationship bloomed. The lovebirds met their sophomore year at Chapman after being on campus again for the first time since the pandemic. Due to the combination of viral TikTok fame and mutual friends, the two were introduced. 

“Cooper had a TikTok during our freshman year, and he was blowing up a little bit,” Parke said. “He had a TikTok where he talked about Chapman in it, (which I saw). Once I got to Chapman, we had two mutual friends that were dating at the time who introduced us but we never officially got to meet before COVID. And then once we both moved back to Orange our sophomore year, we met up.” 

Working together as tour guides has not only brought them closer to each other, but Scott told The Panther he now knows more about Chapman than he ever expected. Due to training courses and repeating Chapman facts for 90-minute tours throughout the day, Scott said becoming a tour guide is a ticket to becoming an expert on campus. 

“I always really enjoy my tours because I feed off other people's energy," Scott said. "That’s my favorite thing about giving tours because even if I'm not super excited to give a tour that day or not too excited to go to work, after I finish the tour, I'm always in a really good mood because I enjoy that social interaction.”

Spending countless hours with each other outside of work has led to a clear distinction between work and home personalities in this pair. According to Parke, Scott’s goofy personality shines through regardless of his surroundings, but the same cannot be said for herself. 

“I definitely think that Ashley is a little bit different in the office and outside of the office," Scott said. "But I think that’s just because she likes to be comfortable with (friends), and around the office she likes to be in that professional setting. I think she's better at being professional than I am. But when we both pick up the phone, we are pretty similar.”

Scott’s older sister was a tour guide before him, which is why he felt inspired to follow in her footsteps. When Parke was first hired, Scott would nag her about forgetting facts or messing up on specific Chapman details that he had learned from his sister. But Parke told The Panther that campus information is constantly changing, which helped her ignore her boyfriend questioning her knowledge. 

“When I was in my first training stages, (Scott) would sometimes correct me on some of the information,” Parke said. “I got hired before he did. And so I had to be like, ‘Wait a second, that's not right.’ So I think it's just been kind of funny in that aspect. I like that kind of competitive nature.”

Although Scott is usually the one with sarcastic, silly comments at work, one day he discovered as much as there are surprises in relationships, there are surprises at work too.

“I was giving a tour one day, and Ashley's mom came into town to visit and they actually both came and hopped on my tour,” Scott said. “While I was doing my tour, both of them were sitting there and watching and her mom thought it was absolutely hilarious and amazing. It was really hard to do my job when I kept looking into the crowd. It made it very, very difficult to stay focused.”

Even though working together has proven to be fun for this pair, they both share the same sentiment when it comes to what they hope prospective students take away from experiencing their tours. 

“I just want everyone that comes on my tour to feel the same way I did about Chapman," Parke said. "Even if it's not the school that's for them, (I) just really (want to) convey that (enthusiasm). I think Chapman does a really good job of hiring and training tour guides who are very different from other schools. I hope that everybody leaves our tours feeling like, ‘Oh, this is not the same experience that I had at every other school that I toured.'"