Did this change recently? My chapter had a member who stayed active during her 5th year (graduated in 2006). She even lived in the house.

It's not supposed to be an option to go alum early. :) A collegiate is a collegiate until she leaves school. :D

eta: I just double checked the NPH and apparently there is an exception for the situation that SigKapSweetie described. I know that in 2000 they had changed it to pretty much only married members can petition to go alum early. What's listed now is reasonable though. :D

From what I understand, my organization counts from when you first enter "college" (whether it be a CC, JC, University or whatever). Just because you transfer doesn't mean you can start all over again. A few of my sisters have been transfers from community colleges, and they were considered Juniors. So they got their junior year & senior year in the sorority. And a few did become 5th years.


If you really want to be in a sorority, you should still go through recruitment. Remember, your sorority experience doesn't end in college.

I was in your situation SunnyFL, I was a "junior" (depending on how you look at it) and rushed. I was only able to get one complete year as an active collegiate and as much as I wish I could get more, I wouldn't change the experience for the world.

*nod* we had members do both and I graduated several years after 2000. And I know that if it wasn't your fifth year, you either had to no longer be a full-time student or be getting married. However the fifth year nursing student who was doing primarily clinicals also got an early alum because she requested it, and another fifth year student stayed active.

Seriously, it all depends on your major and if you have lots of prerequisites you have to take. My junior year was DEFNITELY harder than my senior year (which included cake classes like Intro to Education and Piano Class I). Sometimes people take the harder classes in the summer to get them out of the way.

The only major I can think of where you are definitely going to be occupied for some time and not able to participate a lot is education, when you're student teaching - and most groups do have a "professional status" classification for that (and if they don't, they should).

If a woman says she'll be active her fifth year - believe her - rather than just assuming that she'll bail because she's older. This is why I don't like programs that focus on "senior retention" - just the existence of such a thing is essentially telling women that most seniors don't stay active (i.e. if you do, you'll be a weirdo) and that freshmen are the only members worth rushing.

I wanted to pop in and say that I completely agree with you, 33girl. It feels as if thought they expect seniors to be busy and not want to go to chapter, events, etc. I know that my last two quarters at school, I had so much more time due to fluff classes. I wish chapters (and I saw this at all chapters at my school) would do senior retention activities because honestly, it felt like sometimes they were just waiting for us to be done and the only activities that were scheduled, etc, were ones geared toward the freshman.

Seniors want to be active too! Just in different ways than our freshmen sisters.

Alpha Gam is piloting a new program directed toward keeping seniors involved and beginning to expose them to life as an alumna to work on encouraging lifelong active membership. I'm very hopeful that it will make a big difference. We've got to recognize that the needs of our seniors are different than the needs of our freshmen and start addressing those differences. We're looking at the collegiate experience in stages: Alpha: New member program, Gamma: Middle years and Delta: Senior year, with different programs and activities geared toward each. Alpha and Delta will be rolled out soon and Gamma is still being developed.

This is the kind of thing that I would love for NPC sororities to do if they don't do them already. I think it would really help with alumnae wanting to participate once they are done with college (and not solely in assisting the collegiate chapters). It leads to not thinking "I was" a XYZ and thinking "I am and always will be" an XYZ. But these activities are different and need to be tailored.

But if you really DO have a problem with senior retention, shouldn't you work to address it? It seems a bit silly to ignore the problem so that you don't tell women something that is actually true. They aren't stupid, and the juniors would figure out that the seniors start disappearing without a program. With a program you might actually fix the problem.

If YOUR CHAPTER has a problem with senior retention, you should definitely address it with in-chapter programming.

But I don't think it should be a national initiative as for some chapters it is a complete non-issue. It's like forcing every chapter to have a committee in charge of hiring house staff when a lot of chapters don't have a house and have no prospects of one.

I just don't think every aspect of chapter programming has to come from your nationals. Create a program on your own, get nationals to approve it, and then offer it to other chapters IF they need help on that issue - not automatically assuming that all chapters come out of the same cookie cutter and will all have the same problems.

Ah, I did not get that from your original comment. I think it's a good thing to have a program available from HQs but not to require it if it isn't needed at a particular chapter. Then again, I've not seen such that sort of requirement from our HQ, their programs are either optional or geared very generally to they are applicable to all like NM programs and such.

No matter how great an I/nat'l programming is, it's a catch-22 on making it mandatory or voluntary. If it's mandatory there will always be chapters/members that really don't need it and then get resentful that they have to incorporate it into their schedule. If it's optional, there will be those who really do need it but since it's voluntary they don't use it because they already feel they are over-programming/over-scheduling their members.