24/7 communication is not your friend. If daughter had to wait until Sunday evening to make a 5 minute long distance phone call, we'd be getting a lot fewer of these sob stories.


So true!

I prefer the pre-school rush. First, it doesn't get in the way of classes and studying. Second, girl does not get bid and the next set of arrivals do not care.

The two of you are talking about a completely different set of demographics. The campi where deferred recruitment would really improve retention rates are the opposite of the campi where hell would freeze, melt, and freeze again before they would even consider deferred recruitment.

Do you know of a campus where they went to deferred and it improved retention rates? And since you obviously have a campus (or campi) in mind - where do you think deferred WOULD improve retention?

SEC was the topic in the op, so that is where I've focused my comments. I would be interested in knowing if and where deferred recruitment works/would work better than standard recruitment. I am most familiar with SMU, and I don't know that I would say it works for them based on what I know about what happens during the fall.

I went to SMU, and I liked deferred recruitment. It allowed us to get our feet underneath us before rushing. Despite not talking about rush ;), we did meet and talk to plenty of girls in houses and definitely had an opportunity to make good impressions (or bad depending on the situation).

As an active, it gave us the whole fall to prepare for rush, we held workshops and really got to know girls going through by the recs and inside info we had access to.

I think it opens up eyes from both sides. Just my opinion.

Edit to add - as to the housing situation, you didn't get to live in the house until your senior year (or junior if you were lucky or an officer) so there was no issue with housing contracts.

And, I think it helped academically (which is the REAL reason we all went to college, right?) to have that semester to learn how to handle the work load without the extra load of pledgeship.

It also allowed friendships to develop among the freshman before they were split into groups, which I think helped keep lines of friendship and communication open after we all went to different houses.

Okay, that's all :)

SMU
 

Thanks srmom - that pretty much lines up with what I've heard. Your ";)" confirms what can be good/can be bad - basically, fall is one giant recruitment - rules are broken quite often, and that can work to your advantage as a pnm or not. I've known girls who felt they weren't able to "work" the fall and had a disappointing recruitment, and others who, like you apparently, felt they had a chance to really get to know the houses. I'd like to see the ";)" taken out of it - just schedule fall events, or regulate the reality instead of pretending that the pnms are somehow going to spend an entire semester on campus without interacting with the sororities.

Yes, it is ludicrous to think that you can be on campus and spend the whole semester in panhellenic silence! LOL

Many a girl's recruitment is ruined by bad fall behavior, and many a girls is advanced because she shined all fall.

But, honestly I've seen the same thing at UT with girls going to Round Up in the spring and hanging out in Austin on weekends and tagging along to parties or going to fraternity formals, etc. There is plenty of rushing going on at those events too. I'm sure that UT is not the Lone Ranger when it comes to "pre-rush-recruitment".

Don't know how to fix it, just making observations.

Yep. I think it was Bama that tried to cut down on spring/summer recruitment events with high school seniors - someone know something?

Oh, yes yes yes.:rolleyes:
DD called me one day, crying and practically screaming about some horrible problem that had no solution (not sorority, class stuff).:eek: I agonized for 24 hours trying to think of a way to help her.
Finally I called to ask her if she was OK, and she said, "Oh yeah, I figured that out." And went on to chat happily about what she and her boyfriend were going to do that night.

Kids. :cool: God bless 'em.

I know that Bama was trying to cut down on these as of a few years ago. But I also know girls who have attended spring/summer teas for various Bama chapters over the past few years, too.

One year while I was an active at UGA, the rumor was that one chapter on campus was going to lose a semester of socials because of illegal summer recruitment events... but I don't think that rumor did anything to cut down on summer events the next year.

At many of these schools, the unspoken rule seems to be "be very quiet and subtle about how you break the rules." Deferred recruitment would only give more time for even more blatant violations.

I know that Bama Panhellenic has made a rule that high school seniors may not stay in the dorms when visiting UA. I totally understand the reasoning behind rule, but the sad part is that these seniors don't get a "full college tour" experience to include staying in the dorms when they're looking at schools.

Does this mean she is a new member in a chapter that she didn't want or is she not Greek? It sounds like the latter, but if it is the former, I'd encourage her to really dive in and take a chance on the women who took a chance on her.

A lot of schools don't offer this. I only stayed overnight at one college I visited (the one I ended up attending), and that was because it was a plane ride away and the older sister of a friend offered to let me stay with her one night.

I should clarify - I didn't mean a program where you stay with a random stranger (eek). At Bama, you couldn't even have stayed with that friend of yours. You can't stay overnight in the dorms with your very bestest friend in the world if she's in a chapter and you're not.

Well that makes sense because before recruitment you're really not supposed to even be communicating with your very bestest friend if she's in a chapter and you're even thinking about going through recruitment. That's how it is at the university I attended, anyway.