My Retro Recruitment Story- Embarassing how dumb I was
 

I’m a lurker that thought it might be fun to come out with my retro recruitment story, so here goes. Please remember that I was a dumb 18 year old that deserved to be slapped in the head. I’m going to be pretty honest, so note that these thoughts were of a very immature younger me, not the person I currently am. I have everything typed out, so I hope to get it all out today.
I graduated more than 10 years ago, but thought I would tell my story because I feel like sharing, and hopefully it has a lesson in it. A lot has changed, both on my campus and in the world since my time in college, but my story is still pretty relevant. Please bear with me as my memory is a little fuzzy.:)

I went to a small school on the east coast about 4 hours away from home, and knew about 3 people from my hometown. I was completely clueless about greek life prior to rush, but since a lot of my high school friends pledged at their colleges, I was very interested. My school is a little unique in that it was very divided between “on-campus” national orgs and “local” orgs. The national orgs had deferred recruitment (so you had to be a second semester freshman to pledge), whereas the local orgs could pledge first semester freshman. This made local orgs very appealing to new freshman, even though our campus administration tried to steer everyone towards going national. I wasn’t very interested in local sororities because I believed what the administration told us about how “bad” the locals were and how nice it was to have chapters and sisters of your sorority around the world.

For the sake of everyone’s sanity, I’ll only mention orgs that were key players in my story.
LOCALS
Red- a small local sorority. Didn’t have much of a reputation at all, mostly seemed like nice girls that got forgotten about.
Blue- Local that was well known and thought highly of. Because they were popular, there were rumors that they hazed and were mean/rude to girls not in the sorority.
NATIONAL
Purple- average girls, solid reputation.
Green- national equivalent to Blue and Blue’s biggest rival.
Pink- largest sorority at school. Rumored to “just let anyone in”. Members did not seem close, but did a lot of activities in the community and were well known.
Orange- Very small. Had about 1/5 the members of Pink. Struggled every year with reputation and were known at failing at recruitment.

I'm interested! :)

This doesn't help anyone's sanity. Can you please list ALL the groups if you're going to do this?

Sigh. I missed that.

There are no rules. People who don't want to read your story don't have to. Go ahead and tell the story as you want it.

I was pretty popular in high school, and had high hopes of continuing to be “cool” in college, even if my grades fell to the wayside in the process. Yes, I was a stupid, immature idiot of a college student. I went to parties almost every night and had crushes on all of the “right” boys, which included pretty much any athlete I could meet. When I first arrived at school I made friends with a couple girls in my dorm. They were nice, but I didn’t think I would have a deep connection with any of them. Our backgrounds and priorities were very different (for instance, they actually cared about school work).
During the fall I went to a party with my dorm friends, which turned out to be a rush event for Red. I had no idea what rush events were, just that some random girls had invited us to their house to party… for free! I might have been the most clueless PNM ever. I ended up talking to a Red member that night, and I remember her telling me all kinds of facts about Red and it’s members. Later that week another girl from Red stopped by my dorm room and asked me if I wanted to come to another one of their parties. It was then that I finally realized I was being rushed by Red (remember- I was quite possibly the dumbest PNM ever). I thought of how I hadn’t heard much about Red, and how all the members seemed so… forgettable. I remember thinking that if Red was the only sorority that I had met, were greeks at my school like them? Maybe this was something I didn’t want to be a part of. I told the Red member (and myself) that I just wasn’t interested in greek life, and went about my freshman year without a glance back.

:)