My first thought when I saw all the coats was, "What in the heck do they do with all those coats during a party???" If they keep them on, trying to put a face to a name is discussion would be interesting. "Oh, Gretchen was the cute blond wearing the black puffy coat". Oh, wait, they are ALL wearing black puffy coats. If the pmn holds them, it makes for a nightmare to move around in close quarters. If the sorority women take them, what a trial at the end of the party getting them back to the right PNM. And talk about hat hair!! Glad our school does fall recruitment.

Just an FYI, when we have weather situations, Panhellenic will have ALL the houses do inside starts. I would question any house who would not bring these women out of the cold.

We are used to cold weather recruitment, so we have organized coat checks for later rounds (when the pnms are in skirts/dresses). For now, the recruiter will take and hold the coat however many pnms are keeping their coats on since the houses are cold as well ( try and maintain 70degrees inside when you have the doors open for 10 minutes out of every hour.

Ditto. Lots of PNMs will have their name tags pinned to their coats, so it becomes "Suzie the blonde with the roller skate nametag who liked X." Thank god for rho gam name tags or I'd have been hopelessly lost

Does anyone know which houses have a higher GPA requirement than 2.8? It would be good to know which have dropped girls for the weekend round because of that.

That's a great way to do name tags! Right before I started school they eliminated the custom name tags the chapters at Iowa did. They did cutesy and VERY involved construction paper name tags for every girl attending every party. It was a huge amount of work. With all the other crap going on can you imagine keeping all that straight before parties? And the girls spending all summer cutting and gluing the name tags together for the several hundred that would have been needed! Oh the horror. And this was before RFM so everyone invited more girls and you never knew how many girls were gonna show up the next day.

The coats? I cannot imagine 800+ pairs of snowy boots marching into a house two days in a row.

That is private information.

What is the reason for that? Seems like it would be a decent thing in this brutal process, so girls could know why a particular house didn't invite them back.

You are asking about membership selection, which is private to each chapter. The criteria for receiving an invitation are not divulged or discussed outside the actives in the chapter.

I'd figured that an objective criterion that disqualifies girls from consideration would be disclosed to PNMs, just as the 2.8 is. Silly me.

Please understand with the sheer number of women going through the recruitment process at IU, there are many women who were genuinely liked by a chapter but were ranked too low to be on the invitation list. Each chapter's criteria for ranking is private and falls under what we call membership selection. Possible criteria could be GPA, campus involvement, legacy status, connections inside the chapter. One never knows.

There are a few chapters at IU who were rumored to be looking to boost or maintain their chapter GPA and would be looking for women with higher GPAs, even so there will be exceptions. A chapter can say they are looking for 3.0+ but in all reality there will be a few women in the pledge class under that arbitrary number.

Cuts are hard and truthfully, there is often no rhyme or reason for not being invited back. Sometimes it's just best to move on and concentrate on the positive. PNMs who can focus on the chapters who did invite them back and find the positive in each chapter tend to fare better throughout the process.

ITA. My daughter went in with a completely open mind, and tried not to have preconceptions about any house. She got invitations from several of the ones she liked best. Of course she was disappointed about others (and not so pleased to get invites from houses she didn't like at all!) but said today was great and she's excited for tomorrow. I cant ask for more at this point!

I would focus on that and try not to think about the "why." As previously stated, there is often no exact "why" - just because there are so many PNMs and someone has to go. Every chapter has their own criteria based on perceived needs. It's impossible to discern that from the outside. Continued good recruitment to your daughter.

I gave you an honest explanation. Sorry you didn't like it. You took offense at nothing.

Good luck to your daughter.