yellowrose890 |
03-26-2013 04:14 PM |
I know no offense was meant by any one here (at least I hope not), but I just have to chime in. This is going to be a very long message, so bear with me.
I went through recruitment at a school that had a local among a few other sororities. When I went through recruitment, I got to meet a wide variety of girls who were from different backgrounds and who were all fairly pleasant and who I truly liked. However, like many of you have all previously experienced, there was one house that I fell in love with right away. One house shined just a little brighter to me because I felt an instant connection to the girls. I still liked the girls in the other houses, but the girls in that one sorority just made me feel at home. I knew this was the house for me and when it came to signing my pref card, I only put that sorority down. The next day I received a bid. Flash forward a couple of years. I am currently a senior in my last semester of college and there has never been even a millisecond where I regretted my decision to join a local sorority.
For those of you who question local sorority pledging processes, my sorority completely bans hazing. Aside from the fact that hazing is completely unnecessary to make the lifelong bonds of sisterhood, we feel that because we do not have a national organization to back us up in case of legal problems or issues with the school, it is too much of a risk to even consider doing something that could be considered hazing. So just know that there are some locals out there that don’t haze.
For the next point that we might not have super meaningful rituals or traditions. Our sorority has a fairly long history. We were originally a national sorority. However, we broke away due to significant disagreements. We have repeatedly been given the chance to re-affiliate with our national (by the national itself) but have chosen not to because we love our rituals and our sisterhood and we feel that it would be so painful to give that up. The traditions and history of my sorority are incredibly important to me. I am not kidding when I say that I get incredibly emotional during our rituals because I am so moved. I think about how hard it was for my sisters to stand up for something they believed in and to take a chance to create something new and beautiful (please don’t take this as me bashing national sororities, it was just a different time). We have had founding sisters come and visit our house and it is just such a meaningful experience for both sides. It is amazing for me to meet my sisters who created our rituals and traditions and it is amazing for them to come back and see how much we’ve flourished.
The next point I'd like to address goes into how our chapter functions. We have a house. We have a cook. As a former treasurer, I was in charge of creating and maintaining two different budgets. One budget is for dues and our other budget is for our meal plan. I was in charge of paying our cook and working with our accountant when it came to her payroll taxes. I was in charge of paying bills. We have two separate bank accounts. We also work with an insurance company for our sorority that covers any events we might have . Since our school owns our house (that is a crazy story I’ll have to share at a later date), they are in charge of the insurance costs for anything that happens inside the house. We used to have a house resident, but in the mid-90’s our house resident wrote a report to the school that essentially said she trusted us to be on our own. We still have a school security guard walk through the first floor at 11pm and 3 am to make sure everything is okay.
Now my favorite part… Okay, we don’t have hundreds of thousands of alums around the country. I am too tired to count the composites, but I’m going to make a rough estimate that we have over 1,500 alums. Yes, that’s a lot smaller, but that doesn’t make it any less important. It’s a small world. I have a friend studying abroad in Europe who met an alumna of my sorority walking down the street. I was in the airport the other week and met an aunt of an alumna. It’s still possible to make those connections. For personal experience in applying for a job, I am working with 3 sisters next year who put in a good word for me. One of my friends just got an internship working at another sister’s company. It is still possible. Please don’t think that just because there are fewer local sorority alums we aren’t able to have that same instant connection or that we aren’t able to reap the benefits of sorority membership. At our Alumnae Weekends, we have alums come from across the country. We are currently working on a 5 year plan to make significant renovations on our house. Our alums are very active and involved.
I’m sorry this is so long, but I just had to say something. If you have any questions about anything feel free to PM me!
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