Starting a New Sorority at IU.
 

Hello everyone. I know there are other threads that discuss starting sororities but I don't know if my case is any different-so any advice is lovely! Anyway, I went through formal rush and decided that none of the 19 (that's right, we have 19) sororities really fit me. It is also so competitive that it is overwhelming. Around 1,600 girls rush for the 19 houses. And around 900 get the houses they want.

So, after going through the entire process I have decided to investigate starting a NEW sorority. I have around 7-10 girls that are interested.

A problem...

Almost all the sorority houses have filled their quota except one... what does that mean for starting another house?

I am talking about the Indiana University-Bloomington campus...sorry for all the confusion :)



Thanks so much everyone! I'm new to all this (no family is greek life at all).

I am wondering, since 18 is a rather large number to "choose" from and I would guess that most people would wonder the same thing, is what characteristics are lacking from every one of the existing chapters, that you could not find a fit in any one of them?

And if you desire characteristics that are absent in any and all of the existing sororities, does it make sense that perhaps that social Greek life a la NPC) is not for you? In which case, bringing a 19th NPC group would probably not suit you. Is it safe to assume that?

Or, are you disatisfied because you were not matched (I ask because you mentioned that all of the chapters but one are at quota)?

I am not sure what you mean by "starting a PHC sorority",(what is PHC??) but choosing X over Y because it is easier is definitely not the way to find a fit. You are sacrificing any number of things for the sake of convenience. I suggest thinking hard about what you want, because I am not sure you know what that is. (Feel free to correct me if I am mistaken.) Once you figure out what you want, you can look at organizations based on those needs/desires.

Without knowing what happened, or what you are looking for, it's hard for anyone to give you solid suggestions.

So you didn't find your place in the existing 18 sororities, you know how competitive it is, but you want to just up and "start" a new (NPC?) chapter at a Big 10 school? Sorry, I don't see a need to dance around this one, it'll never happen. Join a club.

In order to start a new NPC group at IU (not sure which IU this is, assuming Illinois or Indiana, didn't check which one had 18 NPCs), the campus would need to be opened for expansion.

In order for the campus to open for expansion, the Panhellenic council there would have to vote to open for expansion.

So the choice to start a new NPC group at IU is not really in your hands.

You COULD start a local sorority or interest group. This is an extremely difficult process however, and especially at a large school there will be many hurdles in order for you to grow numbers and gain campus recognition. Read this thread before you start down that path:

http://www.greekchat.com/gcforums/sh...ad.php?t=93174

If you are truly interested in joining an NPC and there are any groups under total at IU, I would recommend that you consider continuous open recruitment with them if it is available. That is probably your best chance to join an NPC. I don't know why you feel you didn't fit with any of the chapters, but if it happens that you feel that one or several of them are "beneath" you, you're probably wrong. On the other hand, if you just failed to match in formal recruitment, maybe you could give some other orgs a chance. Or otherwise, just realize that you may not be able to be a member of the NPC.

Indiana University at Bloomington has 19 NPC chapters. University of Illinois also has 19 NPC chapters .. but will have 20 in the fall after Alpha Xi Delta
recolonizes.

Her profile says she's in Bloomington, so I'll assume it's Indiana University.

As someone who graduated from IU, I find it hard to believe that you didn't feel like you would fit in any of the houses there. Was it more of a situation where you didn't get invited back to the sororities that you liked? If so, I would consider going through formal recruitment again, this year. Just because you weren't invited back last time, doesn't mean that you won't this time.

i agree with most of the responses here - if you didnt fit in with 19 organizations (of 26) then i'm thinking that being greek may not be your style to begin with.

19 orgs may have not fit you, but that doesnt mean you have to bust your hump to MAKE it fit you. dont think that making your own org (or colonizing with a new org to come to your campus) is an easy out to receiving a bid to the orgs that already exist on your campus.

there's a reason why the other 7 NPC orgs arent at IU. there simply isnt a need. that is a LOT of competition to deal with as a new org, esp. if theyre all (but one) is making quota. and if about half of the girls who went through rush didnt become members, that's a good thing - that shows exclusivity. not everyone is going to get in.

and also, it really would help if you had more than 7-10 girls to make this happen, esp out of 700 girls who didnt get in a house.

Anyone have the stats? Is it really 700 who didn't get a bid? (We can't know if those who received a bid received one from the/a house they wanted.)

That figure jumped out at me too. 700 out of 1600 started Recruitment and didn't get bids/got cut or voluntarily withdrew? That seems incredibly high.

If the numbers from recruitment are as bad as you say, your Greek Life office may already be considering adding another chapter. Talking to them would be your FIRST step anyway. If they are not open to adding another group, you're out of luck.

Some of the advice here would be good advice at a different campus, but remember that IU does not use a quota system. Because of this, many PNMs do go bidless. (I don't know if it is 700, but it is an issue.) The number of bids issued is not proportional to the number of PNMs.

Additionally, I don't think it is fair to say that the fact that more NPC groups are not there proves that there is no need. What about Ole Miss and other schools like that? There are places where the local customs interfere with the typical NPC atmosphere. IU is one of those places.

I think more than 900 get placed....she said that 900 get the house that they wanted, which maybe means that they wanted from the beginning, which is really an unmeasurable number.

I don't know if it is the same now as when I was there, but basically this was the way it was:

Out of the 1600 or so that go through 19-party in the Fall semester, 900 of those girls will get a bid. The vast majority of those girls will accept the bid.

What happens to the other 700?
1. Some of them will decide, after going through 19-party, that going greek isn't for them, and won't return for the remainder of formal rush in January.
2. Some of them will not be eligible for rush in January because they won't "make grades" (when I was there, you were not eligible to continue rush if you didn't make it above the grade cut-off for first semester. I think it was 2.5).
3. Some of them will drop out through the rest of rush because they don't get invited back to the houses that they like.
4. Some of them will not match with a house even when they make it all the way to pref night. Either they only had one house invited them back and didn't make it high enough on their list, they suicide pref and don't make it high enough on the house's list, OR they could even go pref night at two houses, list them both on their cards, and STILL not get into either one.

So, it is possible for houses to not make quota even though there are girls who didn't get bids.

I'm glad to read a few things: first, I'm glad it is only one house that doesn't make quota. When I was there, there were a hand-full that didn't make it. Also, I am glad to read that there are 900 girls who get bids. When I was there, the number of girls going through rush was a little higher, but the number of girls who got bids was even lower than 900. The number of "no bids", in my opinion was heartbreaking. And when I was there, the actives came to the dorms, and picked up their pledges (new members now, I guess). While the pledges were at bid night, actives decorated their dorm doors. A few years after I got there, they started having a bus deliver the pledges to the house. I was very glad. For the girls who did not get a bid, having a bunch of laughing, screaming, and chanting sorority sisters running through your dorm must have been very difficult.

Do they have a bed rush there?

What's that?

yes, i think IU has a bed rush. that's where chapter total is determined by the number of women that can live-in at the house. so the number of empty beds = the size of your new member class.

Something a few campuses have; I believe Nebraska has it. In this system, each sorority only accepts as many members as they have empty beds in their house. It tends to lead to a lot of women not getting bids during formal recruitment.

Really? I have never heard about this! I would be interested in hearing from a member of a sorority who does this. How many "empty beds" could a house have? My SEC chapter had a waiting list of girls wanting to live in the house every year. If this was the same case at a "bed rush" school, would they simply not participate in rush?

OH well that makes a difference...

take a look at the size of the chapter houses on the IU sorority websites. they look HUGE to me! Like they house more than just 40-50 girls, which seems to be about the size of the houses where I went to school.

I attended IU's recruitment this past spring and I believe that the number of women not placed after preference was more in 100+ range - not 700.

The 700 figure that she stated was not after preference. I'm sure it was based on the comparison between the number of women who register for recruitment in the Fall semester and the number of women who were placed at the end of recruitment. Unless things are different than they used to be, 1/3 - 1/2 of the women who walk through the doors at 19-party will not join a house in January whether it is because they don't return for the remainder of recruitment, drop out during recruitment week, or don't get a bid after preference night.

take a look at the size of the chapter houses on the IU sorority websites. they look HUGE to me! Like they house more than just 40-50 girls, which seems to be about the size of the houses where I went to school.

Over 100. The year I was a senior they added onto our house and instituted a "no live-out" policy, which meant that anyone already living out had to move back in. There were over 100 active members.

Wowsers!

The 700 figure that she stated was not after preference. I'm sure it was based on the comparison between the number of women who register for recruitment in the Fall semester and the number of women who were placed at the end of recruitment. Unless things are different than they used to be, 1/3 - 1/2 of the women who walk through the doors at 19-party will not join a house in January whether it is because they don't return for the remainder of recruitment, drop out during recruitment week, or don't get a bid after preference night.

I know the OP was talking about total, but there is a huge difference between looking at the total number of PNMs withdrawn/not matched and looking at the number of PNMs withdrawn/not matched after preference. I was clarifying that the 700 was not the number after preference.

Ah. Gotcha. Yes. Sorry that I didn't understand.

The reason the NPC groups who aren't at IU aren't there is because they don't have the mucho deneiro it takes to come onto campus and build a house comparable to the other ones. So OP, if you have that mucho deneiro and want to call the NPC groups that aren't there up and tell them you're going to build them a house, go for it.

LOL.

Random question: Let's say an extremely rich alum wanted to do just this. Build a house for their sorority at an ultra-competitive or huge state campus, and then turn it over to the local house corporation. Has anyone ever heard of this occurring before, or of a sorority accepting such an offer?

I'm sure it's happened before with groups of alums sponsoring a house, I'm just wondering about a single-donor situation.

Paul Allen built his unhoused fraternity a hugh house at WSU, but they were on campus and unhoused for a while. i know this is not the same, but it does happen.

And they are now referred to as "Paul Allen House," haha! It's Phi Kappa Theta, I believe?

Didn't an alum give $3.5 million or so for a total revamp of the Beta Theta Pi house at Penn State?

http://www.greekchat.com/gcforums/sh...ad.php?t=80448

I haven't seen or heard anything about a single-donor sorority situation done in order to bring a new chapter on campus, though. Certainly seems like something that could happen IF the sorority got invited to colonize AND IF an interested donor was known.

Dick Clark donated the house (castle) to DKE at Syracuse, or so I am told.

It's not so much that as it is the lack of land on which to build a house. IIRC, one of the sororities that was housed in a dorm when I was there years ago wanted to build a house, but they could not get land to build it on. And it really is all about the house - of the 3 sororities that closed when I was there, 2 of them were housed in dorms. When almost every other sorority is in a gorgeous mansion, being housed in a dorm is a HUGE disadvantage.

Interestingly enough, this doesn't seem to be the rule for fraternities. Quite a few fraternity chapters have chartered/recolonized since I was there. (In that time there has been exactly one sorority chapter opened - AOPi recolonized.) There are several unhoused chapters at IU.

From the info in your post, I think that I was at IU just a few years before you. When I was a junior or senior, TriSigma colonized on campus (living in Ashton) and ADPi was also over in Ashton, too. I agree that the location put them at a disadvantage. When I was going through rush, I didn't consider ADPi because I wanted to get out of the dorms, not commit to a few more years in then. I "regretted" them right after 19-party for this reason.

When I was there, the North Jordon Extension was "extended", so to speak, and there was a whole street just waiting for new houses. My understanding is that houses quickly went up out there. I didn't realize that land was an issue.

One of my rare delurks, just to throw in this about the housing situation at IU. Being unhoused isn't just a disadvantage by comparison to chapters with beautiful mansions and non-dorm-food kitchens. Because pledge classes are sized with live-in spaces in mind, the "Campus Culture" of sorority life at IU seems to be more focused on living together in the house, and the anticipation that when you join, you expect to live-in most if not all of your time at IU.

Not to say that nobody ever lives out, because of course some do. But Greek Life, at least for the NPC women, seems to revolve around what goes on inside the chapter houses more than you might expect at schools where quota is based on number of PNMs at pref, rather than house beds.

This makes the hurdles for an unhoused colony even higher first glance.

Not to get off topic, but does anyone know who will be taking over the AEPi house next year? I saw that they were removed from campus and suddenly all of their letters around their house were gone, kinda like SAE a little while back and whoever lived in the house across from Gamma Phi Beta next to St. Paul's Catholic Church. It's now a police training facility. Someone said that was TKE, wasn't sure.

One of my friends was in an NPC at IU and they said that their rush "ceiling" was based on empty beds. It wasn't 100% on that, but it was in the general number that they based on for every recruitment period.