I guess we're supposed to go door to door and ask every girl, "Are you sure you don't want to rush? You might regret not doing it. We don't want people thinking you're riff-raff or anything."

I've actually never heard the word "riff-raff" used in a non-deragatory way.

The way that Purdue used to do formal recruitment was cruel and unusual. We had two rounds during either October or November (I cannot remember which.) These were on different weekends. If I remember correctly, they were not consecutive weekends. We did not see our invites until right before the next round.

The worst part, however, was that rounds three and four were the week before second semester. You had to come back early from Christmas break. It was cold and snowy. It was possible to come all the way back for 1 or 2 invites for round 3 and be cut before prefs.

I did however love "frills". The skits were corny, but I never knew what I would see the next time I went to a house. They also helped me remember which house was which after a long weekend visiting many houses.

I guess we should have called them women instead of girls. The rack for you!

http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/...e-devices8.jpg

I think this is just a case of someone who didn't go to a school with a gazillion young ladies going through rush not understanding that you really don't have to do much marketing at those schools. If a lovely 30 page brochure that gets mailed out to all incoming freshmen gets 1000+ girls to go through, do they really have to worry about the 1000 who roundfiled it? At a LOT of schools, just getting girls to go through at all is the hard part, but there are also a lot of schools who wish (secretly) that they could have the girls who are going to be cut for grades or lack of credentials (don't shoot me, I mean activities, involvement, leadership) after the first day, could be eliminated right away to make more time for the eligible ones.

But seriously, if a girl is going to Bama or Auburn (Florida, FSU, Georgia...) and doesn't know about recruitment prior to school starting, I'd be pretty concerned about her observational skills.

I really wish my undergrad used a fully structured recruitment before school started than a minimally/partially structured recruitment. Recruitment was 2 1/2 weeks long and during the week as well as the weekend during the semester. Spending 6 1/2 hours going to recruitment events before having to do homework was crazy, both as a PNM and an active sister (I can think of many times when voting wouldn't end until after 1am).
I also think several sororities struggled because PNMs weren't forced to actually have a look at them past the required 15 first round.
There is also a lot of mind games because PNMs can be invited to some closed events but not all so they couldn't tell if that group was really interested or not, so a lot of great girls fell through the cracks because they dropped out early on. Of course it would be hard trying to figure out who to invite back when 70-100+ girls showed-up to your open event and you only had 30 invites to hand out.