OK now I know how our old Panhel advisor spent her summer :rolleyes: jess & ali - you know what I mean! ;)

So let me get this straight - there are anywhere from 300 to 1100 girls that didn't get bids, and 10 chapters walking around without quota? What do we need to do, call Chuck Woolery and have him make a sorority love connection? :p

I have to say that the thought of all these amazing, motivated women being so severely cut is making me heartsick.
I wish a UGA active could post the insider details for us, I'd like to know exactly what went wrong. The only positive thing you can do with a situation like this is educate other campuses and hope that you can prevent other women from going through this kind of brutal recruitment experience.

anothermom--I sincerely hope that I am wrong about that because the thought of over half the rushees going unbid makes me physically sick!!!! The numbers came from new members.

Y'all, dzrose helped out at UGa rush and ought to be back on here any day to give us some details. Another thing I was told was that originally, only 5 groups made quota and 3 more immediately snapped up to quota. I'm wondering how many more have made it to quota now because 2 of the very strongest groups did not make quota, 2 that are very desirable in this town.

One observation that several rushees made was that many of them were cut almost immediately by the groups they had recs to and not the others! Also, I saw a card that one prominent sorority sent to an alum who had made a rec. This was before rush, okay? But the card thanked the alum for the rec and said that the girl *was* shown every courtesy!

I know that the big groups were probably required by Panhel to cut huge amounts of girls early. I know why--to prevent the problems we had at the SEC schools where I attended and/or advised in which the big groups hung on to girls they knew they didn't want to pledge for several days and then cut them when they'd dropped the smaller groups. Of course, this left the rushees with nowhere to go.

However, I learned last week just how demoralizing it is to a girl to be cut early on by huge numbers of sororities. Also, in the South (and no doubt some other areas), many women have their sights set on a particular group of sororities and if they're released early by those groups, they won't look at any others. Finis. End of rush.

This is all so sad! I hope something happens that all parties will be happy. Are other regional rushes as brutal as the South? I'm from the South, but attend a school outside of the region--where Recruitment (ahem) is really lax.

Insiders's perspective...
 

Hey y'all,

Sorry that I haven't been online to give y'all details this week. I just got back from DZ's pledging in ceremony, and this is really the first time that I've had a chance to sit at the computer for more than 15 minutes at a time. :)

I'm very pleased to announce that Delta Zeta made quota, which was set at 59. Only 8 of the 18 sororities on campus made quota this year. The ones that I know of are Delta Zeta, ADPi, Phi Mu, A Chi O, AOPi and Theta.

I was told by the girls tonight that Pi Phi, DG, Tri Delt, KD, KKG, AGD and D Phi E did not make quota. The other sororities I'm not sure about... Some of those that didn't make quota came as a big shock to a lot of people because they are considered "top" houses on UGA's campus.

I believe that some of the reasons behind the high number of chapters not making quota this year are the following:

1) Panhellenic switched the order of parties this year, which made House Tours the 2nd round and Skit Day the 3rd round. So, if a chapter's house wasn't extremely impressive, then that may have made a difference. (I know that sounds extremely shallow, but after 2 rounds of Rush, the rushees have to cut a total of 12 houses and they don't have much to go on other than superficial reasons at that point.)

2) Panhellenic made mandatory cuts before 3rd round much more drastic this year than in years past. Their reasoning was that, with 1220 girls going through this year, it would be wrong for houses to be able to invite back a ton of girls to 3rd round all the while knowing that they wouldn't be able to offer bids to the majority of them.

3) MANY girls dropped out of Rush after 3rd Round -- a much higher number than usual. I believe that this is largely related to the severe cuts mandated by Panhellenic -- a lot of quality girls were knocked out of the running by some of the higher tier houses that they were counting on, so they dropped out of Rush instead of going to Pref parties at houses that they weren't interested in.

4) I believe that quota was set a little high. It was 50 last year, and the difference between the number of rushees last year and the number of rushees this year simply wasn't large enough to merit such an increase in quota. This, however, is my own personal opinion.

At any rate, I believe that all of the houses did a great job with Rush this year and that they should all be proud of their hard work -- regardless of whether or not they made quota!! :)

Gamma Phi Beta made quota!

I have heard from several reliable sources that being anything but a freshman going thru Rush at UGA is 9 times out of 10 the kiss of death ...that is just plain wrong & should be changed!

release figures?
 

Explain something to me on release figures...I thought that if you weren't interested in a girl you were supposed to drop her ASAP, not carry her through several rounds. Also, I thought that when schools required heavy cuts (for grades, class year etc) they were usually done after first round, so the rushees would hopefully have more time to get over it and focus more on the groups that they had a better chance at. I mean if I had been a UGA rushee and got the whole way to third round in my top choice, then got cut, I think I'd quit in disgust too.

I guess carrying over some girls can be a defence mechinism??? You dont want to cut your throat I guess. There are alot of girls I would see that you liked but they could have been better....I personally looked at keeping them as another chance to get to know them and dropped tomorrow if you dont. I mean how much do you really know a girl after seeing hundreds for 30 mins at a time????

Any news on how SK did?

WOW! ....and I thought LSU was brutal!:eek:

Re: release figures?
 

It is my understanding that grade cuts should be done after round one for exactly the reasons you gave. It's one thing to do massive cuts first or even second night if a PNM isn't going to be bid, I can understand that. Every sorority and every individual chapter knows what it wants for her members, and not every PNM is going to fit into every chapter. But cutting for third night? Who expects massive cuts for third night?

As for getting to the third round and then getting cut, well, my heart still aches for those young women as well as all the chapters. So many people must have been hurt and it sounds like SO MUCH of this could have possibly been prevented. Congratuations to those chapters who did achieve quota (and I'm happy to see AOII there, of course!) Hopefully the other chapters will be able to quickly get there. If anyone knows numbers, is it possible for the remaining chapters to get to quota quickly? Wouldn't that be wonderful for the UGA chapters to achieve, especially after everything that happened during formal week.

This really does give a new meaning to the concept of southern/SEC recruitment. Hopefully the manditory release figures and quota-setting will be handled better there in the future.

Christin

Reading in disbelief...
 

At my school, I believe grade cuts are done before the first round of parties. Anyone who didn't make grades their freshman year is not allowed to even begin rushing. I can't imagine getting all psyched up and going to the first day of recruitment, only to find out that you were cut because of grades. I guess that is one advantage to deferring recruitment until sophomore year.

I can't believe that quota was 59! :eek: Our quota usually hovers between 20 and 25. Reading about all of these crazy southern recruitments makes me soooo glad that I went to school in the north with laid-back (well maybe not laid-back, but nowhere near as competitive), no-frills formal recruitment! :)

Red and buff roses to my Alpha Gam sisters at UGA and our 42 new members! :D That's bigger than my entire chapter!

Re: release figures?
 

33girl,

You're right... if you aren't interested in a girl, then you should drop her ASAP. However, there are some houses on campus that will, for lack of a better term, "string a girl along" for as long as possible just so that they can have a better chance with their bid list after Prefs. The heavy cutting before 3rd round this year was designed to prevent those houses from keeping a bunch of girls that they had no intention of bidding anyway. Unfortunately, it didn't work out quite the way that Panhellenic thought it would, and both the chapters and the rushees were hurt because of it. :(

This is the first year that UGA has done this type of cutting, however, so I honestly didn't really expect things to go smoothly. It will take a while to get all the kinks worked out of the system.

Rush at UGA has always been competitive, but I have to say that, overall, it has always been handled professionally by Panhellenic. These changes will take some time for everyone to get use to, but I think things will even out and, once they have, Rush should run much better for all involved. In the meantime, the houses that didn't make quota have the option of COB and, from what I understand, they are quite successful with it. :)

Some of the chapters at UT string girls along to inflate quota. Sometimes, I just wanted to take rushees aside and say, "Look, this chapter has more legacies going through than it will have room for. You're not a legacy, you're a sophomore, and you don't have a rec there. Start looking around." Sigh.

Some of the chapters at my school used to do the same thing. Then one year it went way overboard. Quota was 15 when there were only 29 PNMs attending Pref and 3 chapters amongst which to divide them. Kappa didn't get any bids that year, because all the PNMs got their first choices. So to fix that, they switched the way quota is figured. It used to be the number attending 2nd set divided by 3; now it's the number attending Pref.

This has only served to make the dirty rushing even more creative. One chapter in particular casually suggests that girls suicide, because if they don't get bidded out via the preference system, they'll be picked up in COB the following week. Of course the girls who are dirty rushed will never say that, because they buy into it and would never tell on that chapter. We took steps to reduce total so that this chapter could not do that, but we were defeated in the measure. So now Panhel's imposing a one-week waiting period between FR and COB. I'm not sure what that will do, whether it will help. Should be interesting.