Does your disaffilation at recruitment extend to not being able to display sorority memoribilia or telling a PNM your affilation? If so, you and your suitemates may want to refrain from decorating or hanging up paddles, etc., until after recruitment.

Talk to your roommates about your disaffiliation and ask that they keep conversation about recruitment and MS to themselves out of consideration for your RA duties during recruitment week. They don't have to stop whispering when you walk in the room, but surely after 10-12 hour days in recruitment, they will be sick of it and ready to talk about something else!!! Have an open discussion about this over the summer and come to an agreement that everyone can live with. Good luck as an RA and to your chapter this recruitment!

Orientation assistants (OAs) can't have any sorority stuff in their rooms, but I think I can. I can't tell a PNM my affiliation, but since it's a sophomore dorm, most everyone is going to know my affiliation...and not that many sophomores will rush anyway. Most girls match freshman year, but a few will go through as sophomores.

The whole situation with RAs not rushing is kind of ridiculous, because OAs get to rush, and they're around freshmen way more during the first week of school! Panhellenic was supposed to change it this year so that only RAs for freshmen dorms couldn't rush, but it turned out that my GLO was the only one that had a sophomore dorm RA, so it was voted down. (Woo hoo for unity?!?!)

At UIUC, RA's did not actively participate in rush because it isn't really fair to the PNM's. Even if recruitment starts right at the beginning of the school year (as ours did), PNM's are living in the dorms for a few weeks during recruitment. A PNM should never feel as though she can't go talk to her RA about something totally unrelated to Greek Life, and letting RA's participate would cause that. If you were miserably homesick, would you want to tell your RA that, even if she was in the sorority you were dying to join? I know it may be no fun to be the RA, but I think it is an important rule for a reason.

Just to throw in a thought... My roommate and I went through recruitment freshmen year, knowing that our RA was in a specific sorority. She participated in recruitment as an active member (the school I was at didn't have rules again it). Recruitment was going well for both my roommate and I and we both hoped to Pref our RA's sorority, XYZ. She was invited to Pref and I wasn't at sorority XYZ and ABC and I was only invited to ABC. The night of Pref, I got "the phone call." My roommate received a bid to our RA's sorority. My RA and her sisters decorated our door and left baskets of goodies for bid day and then they went out for the night.

While she was at Bid Day festivities, I was in the room alone (not the best place to be when your 800 miles from home and upset) and had a major bout of homesickness... maybe it was the rejection of not getting a bid, maybe it was being lonely since my roommate and I had been inseperarable since we moved in. But either way, it was rough... we had only one RA on our floor and the next closest RA was the boys' RA on the next floor (who I couldn't see crying about being homesick to...) and it put me in a bad spot. Later on, things were still awkward between me and my RA (although she later figured out how awkward it was and did her best to make it go away - especially through Big/Lil Week when my roomie got presents everyday and my RA turned out to be her big sister...)

Long story short - it can be really hard on the PNM, especially if she's having a rough time with recruitment and so other things (homesickness or roommate conflicts) tend to be magnified...