I think Drole's right about this one, being a Legacy will help you stand out amongst other PNMs but I've never heard of it guaranteeing anyone anything. Every org is different though, so if you call and they tell you, then great, but I doubt they'll give you much detailed info about it. I hope for her sake that she gets in where she wants to go, but the cliche saying is so so true: everything works out the way it's supposed to and there's a reason for everything.

No guarantee, but "special consideration". Special Consideration could apply to the start of recruitment all the way through bids. They are all correct. It varies by chapter and is confidential.

This depends on the campus. I was a Rho Gamma last semester and we were told that all calls would be made before midnight after preference (day before bid day). I had to call one of my girls who SIPed and tell her she did not get a bid. We then got an email saying that if we haven't heard from PHA regarding any of our PNMs not getting bids, the rest matched!

However, I think last year we had a PNM on GC who went to UCF. I am pretty sure she suicided. Their bid day was at 2pm and she got a call from her Rho Gamma around noon the same day. I think that was cruel of PHA to wait that long to make the calls. She was getting ready and got all excited because she thought she had a bid, but then the phone rang. At least if they hear the bad news at night or hear a lack of bad news, the poor girls can sleep at night!

There's probably some specific time frame where they make those calls, but if your daughter didn't tell you then your choice is to fret or go do something else to take your mind off of it.

You are correct. You have the same chance of anyone else to get your first (and only choice.) I think "suiciding" is less risky than in prior years since most campus panhellenics are reporting that women are getting their top pics the vast majority of the time. If you are high on your chapter's of choice list, you will get a bid. The computer does not penalize you and drop you to the bottom or any other such nonsense. The issue is that if you can at all see yourself in another group, list them so that you have a lower chance of walking away empty handed at the end of recruitment!

And that is probably because of release figures. :)

beebadger, please check your private messages! :)

You're right, drolefille! I think I'll head out to Target -- that could keep me occupied for hours!

Is there a thread where release figures is discussed....? This sounds new to me and I was a Rho Gamma (and I only graduated 3 years ago!)

Release figures have been around for a little while, but have become more popular. Here is a link to the information from the wonderful FSUZeta.
http://www.greekchat.com/gcforums/sh...ad.php?t=22514

Yep, if a groups are more limited in who they invite back and especially invite back to pref, a girl has a much better chance matching to her to choices than she did back in the days when all groups invited more than three times quota back to prefs. (I mean at schools with three pref. parties.)

No group ought to be carrying a lot of extra girls today at pref.

But I'd still recommend people try to be open to all groups they pref and list all they'd be willing to join on the bid card. There are still a bunch of girls who match to their second or third choice, and had they SIPed they wouldn't be Greek today. Only SIP if you know you'd rather not be Greek than join that group. In most cases, you don't really increase your options to join by holding out for COB or re-rushing. (exceptions of course for campuses with weirdly high total.)

I think I was trying to point out that your chances are the same of getting your first choice regardless if you SIP or not, regardless of any other PNM. You're counting on being either on the 1st bid list or high enough on the 2nd to slide into your first choice's NM class.

If you SIP and match, you would have matched your first choice even if you hadn't SIP.

We're saying the exact same thing!;)

I think suicide is a dangerous game of roulette. We had a sorority on campus (I just finished recruitment last night) that "dirty rushed" a lot of girls, telling them to suicide sorority "A" and they would pick that PNM. Out of about 20-25 girls... they only took 6. They knew going in that they could only take 6...

Well when everyone plays by the rules, suicide can be good if you'd rather have no bid if you can't be ABC. It doesn't work when there are unPanhellenic things going on!

I personally advocate suicide. Okay that sounds so wrong! I pesonally advocate SIP. Don't take up a space that someone else really may have wanted or lead another group on thinking you're jumping off stage on bid day to them when you would rather eat dirt and run crying down the street after opening the envelope!

I think that advocating SIP is not realistic. Of course with the release figures, most when are getting their first choice. Recruitment is a confusing time. If a PNM gets stuck on one group and basically ignores the attributes of another group, how would she know that she'd rather shoot herself than become a member. Giving a group the chance to convince you after your released from your favorite group is the basis of the release figures concept. Not SIPing and giving a group a chance after bid is essentially the same. You have until inititation to really decide if it is truly not for you! The majority of the time, the NM will fit in. There are very few groups out there that people would rather die than be a part of if they actually knew what that group was about. I think we do the NPC chapters and the sisters in those chapters a disservice by implying that they aren't worth peoples' time. Every NPC national organization has a rich history that would benefit anyone! Go Panhellenic!!!

I agree with your post if the chapters are fairly big (90 or more). There are usually enough women that you can find at least a few that you connect with. But with smaller chapters, sometimes there IS such a difference that you WOULD rather die than be a part of that group.

Also, the time till initiation is increasingly short - and as we've seen here, sometimes the amount of "real life" the NMs are exposed to is somewhat limited. Everything's great for 6 weeks and then boom - you HAVE to go to everything, you find out the chapter politics and it isn't Happy Pony Rainbow Land anymore.

That is definitely true...but do you think you have a better chance of figuring these things out in under a week? Giving NM orientation a chance gives you a much, much, much more realistic idea of a chapter than a few rush parties. As for the size of a group, sure large chapters should be easy for anyone to fit into, but even 30 girls can't be all exactly the same. You get that many women together, and the group will be diverse just because of the way each woman was raised. Assuming you know everything about every member of a group because you talked to three people during rush is RIDICULOUS!

Well, in some cases, smaller schools have deferred rush too, so (if the campus doesn't have a lot of stupid silence rules that are contrary to the whole point of deferred) she's gotten to know some of the chapter members in a non-rush setting. I know that there were some chapters at my school (total was 50) that I would have not felt comfortable being a part of and would have refused a bid from. Not to say I didn't like some of the girls, that doesn't mean I want to be their sister. I don't think I'd be out of line if I said that probably a third (if not more) of the girls at our school suicided - just because they knew the sororities and the women beforehand.

I agree that you do have till initiation and should give it a chance, I just wonder how much of a "real taste" NMs get sometimes.

my campus seems similar to 33girl's.

we have a deferred rush with only 3 chapters and silence rules only during formal recruitment with each chapter having their own personality. while you can see some girls going between two chapters, you pretty much know where a girl wants to go by the time it comes to formal recruitment. who she has been hanging out with since september, and by her personality who she seems to fit in with.

so we have a lot of girls suicide, and with pledge classes of about 18, and total at 40 (which should be higher because all groups have about 50ish girls in the fall and 65ish in the spring) and most of the girls in my sorority suicided zta, including me. i went to my other preference party, just to see what it was like, even though i had no intentions of putting them on my preference card. so it depends on the campus culture and would you rather be greek or a member of one sorority.

That is definitely different than early fall rush when freshmen come in with no concept of sorority life and no prior experience with the chapters on campus. Sounds like deferred rush can be quite different. Though, I really have to wonder if you wouldn't "discover" great reasons to stay in any particular group you might join. It's the human condition to make lemonade when life gives you lemons!:rolleyes:

suicide
 

I think it really depends on the individual school, the number of sororities there and what the PNM's motivation is to go through recruitment. My school allowed us to attend 3 pref parties and I liked them all enough to rank them (I think there were 9-10 sororities). My daughter just received her bid this week. There are only 6 sororities on her campus and the Greek system is very small --maybe 6% of the students. She could attend 2 pref parties and did. Even though she really liked the girls at both, she felt such a greater connection with one, that she decided to suicide. Since so few kids are Greek, she decided she'd rather not be Greek than be with her 2nd choice. This might be way different at some of the schools with really strong Greek systems. where a PNM would be happy anywhere just to be in a sorority.

This is more along the lines of what I meant by advocating SIP, not so that everyone should do it. But those who can not see beyond it. When it comes to recruitment there are so many girls who have no idea what they are getting into (at least at my school) no matter how hard you try to explain mutual selection, "open mind/open heart", "sisterhood is in every chapter" it is just not going to work out if they can't see beyond that and they can end up dropping like flies during new member period from all groups costing big sisters money and wasting so much effort that could be better placed no matter how much you coddle and baby them.
If someone believes in the deepest depths of their heart that it's ABC or DEATH then they should probably go with that cos there is nothing anybody but ABC can do for you after that if that's how you are going to look at it. I personally didn't do it because I knew I could be happy anywhere, but not everyone can. I hope I didn't come off as rude or whatever, but these girls are out there and I just want to better explain my point. And that is why I feel that SIP may not always be a bad option.

The problem lies in PNM's getting too far along before "keeping an open mind". Often, PNM's have a ton of options, so they just ignore a group on their list that they don't really like. When it comes to pref night, that group is on their list along with one they like, and they want to SIP, because they have not been giving the other group a chance all along.

I totally agree! These women MOST probably don't even know anything about the other chapter to know if they wouldn't fit in. I know how young girls think...they pick one group they like and then only pick up on things they don't like at the other groups. If they were looking for things they didn't like with the group of their choice they'd more than likely find just as many, but they only see that group through rose colored glasses. (I am speaking in general, of course!)

I ranked 2 out of the 3 chapters I visited for preference. Looking back, if I had ranked my third choice and matched with them, I could have been happy, but I couldn't see that during recrutiment. Probably the biggest reason I didn't rank them was that I was preffed by someone I hadn't met before, so the party didn't compare to the other two.

I suicided, but only because I knew there was only one group that was right for me, and it so happened that the rest of the chapter felt the same! (i'm a sap - sorry:p)

However, when I became an executive member of panhellenic, to keep rush numbers up, we strongly discouraged it. However, I still feel that if you feel strongly about one group, and could not see yourself elsewhere.....it's what ya gotta do.

Sometimes it is for the best even if it doesn't work out. I suicided because I was only sure about one of the chapters I went to on pref night and didn't get a bid but I was able to do informal recruitment and ended up really liking a house I'd cut much earlier in formal recruitment and joining there.

Normally I'd say to avoid it, but there are reasons I can understand for doing it. For example, one of my suitemates went through recruitment freshman year. We had four sororities at the time. At the end of days 1 and 2 (mandatory invites), she had ranked 1. ABC 2. DEF 3. GHI 4. XYZ. On day three, she was cut by GHI, but her ranking stayed the same. On pref night, she got invited to ABC and XYZ. Although XYZ had been her bottom choice the entire week, she had not been able to release them, and they kept inviting her back.

She suicided ABC, and when her RC called her to tell her ABC did not offer her a bid, but XYZ did, my suitemate was able to honestly say that she would rather not be Greek than be an XYZ. (She joined DEF the next year).

If there is somewhere that you have throughly disliked all four rounds, and you cannot cut them, I can understand SIPing.

Not true...unfortunately recruitment counselors aren't always schooled in the correct rules of recruitment. I'm sure she was told to discourage SIPing as much as possible, and she thought scaring a girl would do the job. That being said, SIPing is not a good idea....if she doesn't get the bid, it wasn't the computer's fault, it was hers for not leaving herself enough options. The sorority she is SIPing may not want her as much as she wants them...that's why it's a gamble.

computers do not kick out girls who suicide- another urban myth.

panhellenic is the one that uses the computer program. all the sororities submit their lists to panhellenic by a certain deadline, panhellenic enters the data and the computer spits out the invitations.

I am a pledge at the University of Alabama, and I suicided along with one of my roommates. It worked out well for us, thankfully.

rolltideuofa07,


You might want to edit your previous posts--GC detective squad is frighteningly astute.

Eh, I was going to say something, but nevermind.

I want to thank everyone who has taken the time to post here. I only know a little about Greek life, but am learning so much more recently! At D's school, freshmen have to wait till spring to rush. There is only a small percentage of Greek students (5%). D decided not to rush as a frosh, just didn't want to. Then at the urging of many buddies in ABC sorority, she finally decided to give rush a try this fall as a sophomore. She decided early on to "suicide" ABC sorority. I've been reading this very thread on Greekchat all this past week and warned her not to "suicide!" (So thank-you everyone, at least she was warned!) But D felt she'd rather not be Greek at all than belong to any other than ABC. Well, D did not get a bid. She just got this news today! I'm surprised at how much real pain I feel for her. She feels a little misled too; so many ABC girls told her she'd get a bid from ABC, and were looking forward to having her as a "sister!" I know I'm getting this second hand from her.... Trying not to ask too many questions. Don't want her to think I'm worried. (And I do know she'll be ok, she's a survivor! And 95% of her classmates are not Greek....) I'm thinking maybe someone in ABC really did not want D to join! Don't know what else to think! Or what to say to her.....

Please remember that often the case is that a group actually likes a girl but is limited in the number of spaces available. It is possible that the group would have been pleased to have her as a member but the method they use to rank girls didn't put her close enough to the top, rather than that anyone worked to kept her out.

Also, let her know that no one in ABC should have been promising her bids. They can't do that by the rush rules and no one girl has that power. She'll never know how that vote went, and she shouldn't obsess over it.

UGA and Drole, Thank-you. I agree with you both. It really helps me to chat on this board, because I feel there is no one else who understands! Funny thing is she is not telling me or her dad that she is bothered by this. She did let on to her older sister that she is "peeved." I'm glad she has a biological sister, I don't and wish I did. And I guess I've been a little curious lately about sorority life....never having experienced it. Both my daughters and I have close women friends, and friendship is a wonderful thing! So funny thing is: I think I'm more bothered by this than she is! Oh well, I shouldn't obsess, I know! Thanks again for your thoughts.

mom, we never want our children to experience disappointment or unpleasantness-that's just being a parent.

i am sorry that your daughter did not receive the bid that it sounds like she had been promised. it is really rotten when that happens. i am sure that her friends who are members of that sorority truly did want her to join and are very disappointed and embarassed that the sorority did not extend her a bid.
that is exactly why the national panhellenic conference has the rule that sororities are not supposed to bid promise.


if the campus has such a small amount of kids that go greek, i would venture to guess that should she decide to re-rush and didn't let friends influence her, she might have a positive outcome. best wishes to her, no matter what!