Okay, Sunshine, help understand why and how this is a good policy? Really. I want to know. For REALZ. How on EARTH does it make SENSE to force OMGQTFBBQ we absolutely gotta have a rec soooo, lets write some sh*t on a piece of paper about this girl in order to meet the 'national requirement' and call it a day.

Rainbow Unicorn sandbox or not, I am trying my damndest to understand how this is not, in a roundabout way, a 'forgery' or 'fake' or whatever else you want to call it.... because I don't know how on earth you can write a recommendation for somebody you don't frikkin' know. Reading their resume does not tell you a dang thing about their character or presentation, their people skills and if in fact they are a good fit for the chapter. Somebody could be spotless on paper and a piece of doo doo in person, and that poor frantic alumna writes a rec for her because she was "forced to" due to a bureaucratic policy.

Oh wait... I get it.... is rec writing part of ritual? Is that the "tradition" part of it that you speak of?

Well, Sunshine, I could answer you, but won't, because you are for REALZ, obnoxious.

Who reads those pieces of paper? Someone at IO.

I think this is the original intent of a “recommendation.” The act of recommending anyone for anything requires personal knowledge of the candidate.

If I know a PNM well enough to write a rec, I know her well enough to call her and let her know I am doing so. I haven’t had a reason to send in recs for PNMs without their knowledge – I wouldn’t know every fact, activity, and honor to include without their input anyway (I don’t know how anyone would).

Perhaps this just reflects my experience with recruitment on my campus and how my local alum group is organized where recs are concerned – but the thought of an alum squirreled away somewhere furiously writing recs for girls she doesn’t know -- so that they may be offered bids -- is just a foreign concept to me. This seems to negate the point and meaning of having a recommendation that includes matters of substance, and seems to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of a national rec requirement.

So – question for those on a campus where recs are an anomaly but whose org requires them -- recs are written en masse for those being offered a bid instead of prior to recruitment? It’s difficult to imagine, otherwise, that entire new member classes across a campus just happen to all have mystery recs year after year.

An aside – in the younger days of the internet, logging into one’s member account of the national org site was usually required to view/obtain rec forms. Now, just about chapter’s form is available and viewable to anyone on the internet. I’m not sure why some alum groups and chapters upload these to the internet – or why the various national orgs don’t contact them and ask that these be removed from public view.

KC 96...sorry your thread has gone so far off the rails. We do want to hear how things turn out for you, so maybe you might want to start a new thread to let us know about it. Good luck!

Holy cats. So thankful I joined an org that didn't require a rec since I was clueless and merely wanted to find a sisterhood and get plugged into campus. And no, at my campus I wouldn't have been an outlier. If GSU's Greek system required recs (they were the exception and not the rule), our Panhellenic would have died out.

Because policies and procedures like this have helped us build and sustain powerfully strong national and international organizations, many of them going on 150 years. Perhaps when your little young engineering sorority has this kind of strength and experience under its belt, you can share the policies that have gotten you there too.

See? It's not so difficult to be rude and dismissive about a very different organization that you don't know or understand now, is it?

I'm not sure what my national organization's policy is, but maybe we can agree that we don't necessarily agree with everything our organizations do? Either way, I think we all take our memberships seriously, and while we may not have the same practices as you do, we won't mock your traditions and rituals, so please don't mock us.

Anyway, yes, KC 96, PLEASE COME BACK!!!! We want to know how things went!

tl;dr

How many times have you heard "trust your sisters" during rush?

Sometimes that's a collegiate sister trusting another bump line within the chapter during MS. Sometimes that's an alum trusting a bump line when cranking out recs.

My username has nothing to do with a sorority. I'm not an engineer. You are wrong, sock.

Yes, I was a sassy smart ass with my first post, but the responses I received were....mmmmm.... just as smart ass (if not more), and didn't bother to answer any of the questions I posed. I didn't think the questions I asked were terribly hard:

1)Does someone actually take the time to ready the recs that people fratically scramble to obtain? IF NOT, then yes, it's a waste of that person's time, so I hope for all of y'alls sake that somebody is reading each and every damn one of them!

2)If they are actually being read...what's the outcome after reading them? Can someone's bid be denied as a result of that little piece of paper? If these recs are required before being offered a bid.... it would seem to me that some higher power should need to read them BEFORE offering the bid, correct? Which means, that rec would need to be secured (and read by the 'higher power') BEFORE preference.... but maybe I'm overthinking the logistics of this. (Logically speaking, if you have a requirement to have this item, you should have to "do" something with it other than simply file it away to say "we met the requirement by having random words scribbled on a piece of paper.")

3) I'm still having a terribly difficult time understanding how this is not straight up fakery/forgery. If you do not know the person, how do you write a rec? Someone else said "trust your sisters." Okay.... why should a (FAKE RECOMMENDATION!) piece of paper need to be written by some alumna to "prove" that trust on behalf of the collegiate chapter in order to allow them to extend a bid? Why can the collegiate women not vouch for themselves based on what they have learned about that woman over the course of recruitment and their interactions with her leading up to? Why the bureaucratic nonsense?

Instead of getting defensive about the fact that your organization does have this policy, why not think about these questions at face value. What is the REAL purpose? I still don't understand why fake references are a policy other than "just because that's the way it's always been" and none of you have been able to (or are willing to share) one legit reason why.

Pre-internet, ours were printed in our national magazine (which obviously isn't secret). What did other groups do? Did you have to request the forms from HQ or an alumnae chapter?

As far as trust your sisters, that DEFINITELY depends on the sister sometimes. Just because I dig you to the moon and back, doesn't mean you don't have ATROCIOUS judgment.

I recall seeing the forms in our magazine pre-internet; they may still be available in that format (haven't read the magazine for quite a while, too many other things going on). Many pre-internet alumnae (euphemism for those of a Certain Age) will submit printed/handwritten recs so the forms are readily available to them via the magazine.

No advantage or need to keep them "removed from public view". No harm in transparency - why shouldn't the PNM know what questions the form contains? We ask for photos, resume, etc. and we likely know the PNM or have some acquaintance with her, in many cases. She may not be privy to the responses we provide, however.

I laughed at the image of an alum (or alums) furiously churning out recs to fulfill some requirement. Reminded me of the "twelve monkeys sitting in front of twelve typewriters" stuff.

AOE-7, have you discussed recommendations with your alumnae and advisors? You might get some good answers and insight from them as to the history and practice. I suspect that in your lifetime the rec requirement will disappear. Thanks to the Internet and the Millenials' need to document EVERYTHING on the Internet, paired with search engines, we can find out anything and everything about people with a few clicks.

writing this at 3 am because the dog woke me up barking at some wild animal outside (probably a bobcat), and there are something like 16 pages of new posts, mainly spam. This thread was on page 11. I can see how legitimate posts get swept up and dumped in the massive spam cleanup that the super mods and mods have to do constantly. This is unreal.

I'm not saying that I disagree with you at all. I think you have a lot of good points. But as AZTheta suggests, why not bring it up with your national organization, rather than getting snippy with a bunch of people you don't know on the internet who may or may not be a part of your organization? Why should we bother trying to have an intelligent, thoughtful conversation with you if you start it off by being a smartass? Your points may be valid, but you lost a lot of people with your attitude. You're not going to change any policies here. If you're really that concerned, contact people who can do something about it, but I suggest leaving the attitude out of it.

How I would LIKE recs to work (rare and special) and how they work are both not the same thing and completely irrelevant. First, I can complain til the cows come home about how ZTA or Theta or anyone else does it. And then I'll get out of breath, so good for me. My opinion counts for neither jack nor squat. Second, the fact that the system sucks IMO doesn't mean that I wouldn't play the game if I were going through now. And that was the point of this whole meltdown in the first place. Possibly recs aren't really that important at her school. GET THEM ANYWAY. Cross every T. Dot every I. Maximize every opportunity you have for success.

The single only piece in all of this I found valuable is the person who said if they got a rec from a sophomore at her school it would actually be seen as weird. THAT is something I'd like to know more about. And I'd love to know if this is the thinking at the school in question.