Okay, Okay, carnation's retro rush thread (ie, how not to do recruitment)
 

All right, enough with the pms! This thread is about how you shouldn't do recruitment. Keep this in mind, PNMs. Also remember that recruitment counseling was in its infancy and all they were really good for was herding rushees to their first parties.

This recruitmen begins at the University of Arkansas, where women couldn't rush until their sophomore year. Also, UA had "bed rush", where the new pledges moved immediately into their new house so each house could only pledge as many women as they had beds for. This meant that hundreds of women rushed and only a fraction got bids.:eek:

When I rushed, Arkansas had 9 sororities and 3 of those are no longer there; 2 others have come onto campus and another opened but folded. I really wanted to be Greek but I was also a cheerleader and it took up tons of time. It also had some bad effects on our grades because we would often have to leave for the games with the team on Wednesday or Thursday night. Yes, the sororities had study halls for pledges but they also had lots of required pledge duties. Another cheerleader was rushing with me but she felt that she could handle it all.

So...the first day we visited all 9 groups. Impressions that I can recall:

UNO-this was a smaller house. There were 2 older cheerleaders in it and they were nice but I wondered what it was like to feel like you always had to be rushing.

DOS-a slightly larger house. However, they actually offered the rushees cigarettes on a tray and smoking was considered rather trashy back then. I figured they wouldn't have good returns by the looks of the rushees' faces.

TRES-my guide was a national officer. She was sweet and the house was intriguing!

CUATRO-I can only remember a cute skit and that an older cheerleader was in this house. I still have her old uniform, lol.

CINCO-an older house to which we had some connections. Also a very interesting building! My roommate was a legacy and would like to be a Cinco.

SEIS-gorgeous house and members. The other cheerleader, "Debbie", was very interested in them.

SIETE-this was reputed to be a great house but it was not only literally freezing cold but many rushees talked about how they seemed to have their pledge class preselected and to heck with everybody else. My roommate's best friend was a Siete and she was also interested in Siete.

OCHO-a small house and unfortunately, not many rushees were interested.

NUEVE-the women were very enthusiastic; I can still see them dancing and singing in front of the house before we entered. Debbie liked them too.

The sororities at Arkansas back in the day were:

AXO
ADPi
XO
DDD
DG
KAT
KKG
Pi Phi
ZTA

We were told we would get our invitations back the next day at noon. One girl in our group asked the rush counselor what to do if she didn't get any invitations back. The counselor looked stunned and unprepared and said, "Uh, that would never happen."

YAY!!! I'm so glad you are doing a thread!

Carnation? What year was this??

:::::ducking:::::

Sometimes I fear that this is the type of Rho Chi I was-

that being said I did report some rush infractions against a chapter who were making phone calls to PNM's. :eek:

go TRES!!!

hooray...i am "hog" wild for this tale!

I wonder where she'll end up...

...so I go to cheer practice the next morning. When we show up at noon to get invitations, they tell us that the computer broke down and we won't get them until late that night. Parties are postponed. Whereupon our captain calls afternoon stunt practice and I, being the littlest, get thrown around the most and am hurting by the time dinner rolls around. Let me just creep into my bed and die.....

Ah ha! So they had computers back then!!! ;)

BUT - how big were the computers? And did they use punch-cards???:p

I seriously was going to ask that, but I've already done enough elderfying today.;)

They were the kind you see on the Flintstones, where you slide stone cards through a slot and little dinosaurs bite the holes into them. And they broke down that year and the next and were still breaking down 5 years later at Mississippi State.

Oh OH ... I worked on those ... when I went thru rush in 1970 I worked in the computer center and got to help run the invitation acceptances thru the sorter.

But man it was nasty cleaning up after those little dinos :D

It was a mainframe, using SORUSH v1.0, which was programmed in COBOL. :p

OK, carnation, I'll stop making you feel old, provided you update soon!

I'm looking forward to this rush thread not unlike my anticipation of the Soprano's finale, BTW, the gas station Phil was "clipped" at is near my house in NJ!!

~end hijack

..so my roommate and I are trying to stay up that night and the invites don't come and we finally drop off to sleep around 11. The phone rings at 11:30!-but it's not the counselor, it's Coach Broyles who wants the freshman and sophomore cheerleaders to show up at some pep rally for the JV team.

Somewhere in the middle of the night, the counselor shows up in our room with invitations. I sit up groggily, look at the invitations, nope don't really like those, tell the counselor to drop me from rush, and go back to sleep.

Wow!!!

I love threads where that happens in the first couple of posts! It makes for such great twists and turns.

KEEP GOING CARNATION!!! Cuz, I have to work until 10p....

The next day I had to go over to Housing to arrange for a dorm; you see, you didn't register for housing if you were rushing because you hoped you'd be moving into a sorority house that week. As you can imagine, there were many women in line. The girl who asked if people were ever cut by everybody the first day and was told no was indeed cut by everybody. I got to know her at Student Senate during the year and never could figure out why that happened because she was attractive, certainly no skank, and had good grades.

Many people had only gotten invited to Uno or Ocho and refused to take those options. The thing was, since over 500 people were rushing and there were less than half of those spaces open for pledges, the sororities could be very choosy so many fabulous women were lost to the Greek system forever.

Debbie (the other cheerleader) and Cathy (my roommate) went to their favorite 4 for Skits and their favorite 2 for Prefs. It looked like Cathy, a legacy, would be getting a bid for sure.

I don't really follow this?

a lot of ppl dropped out because they were cut by everyone or they weren't happy w/ where they got invited back to right???

The girl was told by a rho chi "no, you can't be cut by every chapter" and indeed she was call from all the chapters.

A few were cut by everybody but it seemed that most who were in line at Housing had dropped out of rush because they were unhappy with their invitations. I thought it was ironic that the girl asked if anyone was ever cut by everyone the first day did have that happen to her. Well, tough for the sororities--she ended up being a great campus leader!

KSUViolet, I don't know why they offered cigarettes. It would have been really low class to smoke them during rush! I've heard of a few houses offering them at various schools, though.

I love this thread!!

Ha Ha, you and I are the same age! I don't think U of Ala. used computers back then...the earth was still molton lava and it was too hot!!:eek:

So we come to Bid Day. I had planned to be elsewhere when the bids were given out but surprise! The computers acted up again and the bids were late so I was caught in traffic on Sorority Row when the happy NMs were spilling down the street. That was hard.

Debbie didn't get a bid from either sorority she preffed.

Cathy didn't get a bid from either sorority she preffed, including her mother's group, so I guess that sororities didn't have the rule then that legacies who go to Prefs must be put on the first bid list.

I still wanted to be Greek very much but I could see that with cheer duties vs. pledge duties, it'd be next to impossible. Then I found out that if I wanted to continue in my major, I would have to transfer because Arkansas was dropping it so I put Greek life on the back burner. I got an open rush bid but turned it down. I had plans for my next recruitment.

I don't really understand the point of a "bed rush". It doesn't make sense financially, and a Greek community doesn't allow itself to grow. If you could fill your house AND have members out of house paying parlor fees, that is more money for the physical house, right? Plus, more members equals a bigger budget for more fun stuff. Plus, not everyone would want to live in a chapter house, so it could further draw people into the community. Does anyone know the rationale behind a bed rush? It seems very silly to me, unless you want your community to remain stagnant and exclusive.

I think it is sort of like that, but I'm not exactly sure how it works. Rush is (mostly) held the week before spring semester starts, and new members don't move into the houses until the following fall semester.

ETA: At IU pledge classes are generally anywhere from 30ish-over 50 members. Pretty much all the chapters have over 100 members.

Different time and era....

Arkansas continued bed rush for awhile. I have an annual from 6 years after I went through recruitment and it says that 624 girls rushed but only 264 received bids. A couple of years after I rushed, they changed sophomore rush to second-semester freshman but cheating was still rampant and they went to first-semester freshman rush, which they still have.

I knew by midterm that I would be transferring to Auburn. I had no idea what their Greek system was like but I worked hard on my grades (any PNMs reading this, especially if you're rushing a second time--do this! This is the one thing I did right!) and added some more leadership activities to my resume.

So fall came and my father flew me to Alabama. Auburn had 14 sororities at the time: AXO, ADPi, AGD, AOII, Chi O, DDD, DG, DZ, Gamma Phi, Theta, KD, KKG,Phi Mu, and Pi Phi.

Hmmmm.....I went through rush at Auburn in 1975.....wonder if we were there at the same time????

Am I the only one who thinks this is a hilarious quote coming from carnation?! :D

WAR EAGLE :)

War Eagle! :)

xokathy, we didn't say skank then, we just came out and said, well, whore. But after teaching so many years plus having such a huge family, I tend to use my kids' and students' words!

Panhellenic divided us alphabetically into 14 groups since there were 14 sororities. We went to half the chapter rooms on each of 2 days. I felt sorry for the freshmen, especially those who knew nothing of Greek life before, because there was so little time with each group and how could they remember which was which? It was obvious, though, that many of the gorgeous and polished rushees knew exactly which sororities they would accept from the first day, they'd probably known for years. (This would be about 3/4 of the rushees.) Last year's Auburn PNMs we knew said that this has not changed and their Greek moms, who stayed near campus during recruitment, were stunned by the beauty and poise of all these girls.

Many of the chapters we visited made a huge deal over one of our group members, who was going to be the Orange Bowl Queen that year. Most of our group thought she looked about 30 with heavy, harsh makeup. Anyway, several group members were being ignored by their rushers, who just had to meet and talk with her.

I lived in an upperclass dorm and there were about 10 other upperclassmen from the dorm who were rushing. I felt much more at home with them than I did with the mostly freshman rush group I had. None of us knew that sophomores and juniors were cut heavily at AU but we were about to find out.

OOohhh! A cliffhanger!

Tell us more!