Maximizing your options
 

maximizing your options probably means different things to different people. at some schools the scenario that you mentioned is the way it is. you must attend every party you are invited to or your are dismissed from recruitment by panhellenic-even if some of your invitations are to chapters you "tried to drop". it also means keep going and stay in recruitment, even if you are not invited back to your favorite chapter or if you don't have a full days worth of parties. It means listing all the sororities that you attended pref. with on your card. it means going to bid day even if you received a bid from your #2 or #3 choice. It also means giving your new member period a chance.

you daughter is correct. it is not the same as when we mamas rushed. chapters are not required to bid legacies, and there are so many legacies going thru at some schools, even if the chapter loved them all, they could not pledge them all.

FSUZeta said it perfectly!

Basically, it means ranking every chapter you're invited back to each round. Say, for example, you attend 15 parties the first night, and can attend up to 10 for round two. To maximize your options, you'd have to rank all 15 chapters you attended. If you're invited back to 7 chapters for round two, you would attend all 7 parties and rank all of them at the end of round two. Good luck to your daughter! :)

Thanks to everyone who responded. When I was a collegian we had "bed" quota, so I think today more girls actually have a chance at getting a bid, if they maximize their options. I am aware that being a legacy does not carry the weight it did when I was in college. I am the "glass is half-empty" kind of a person, so I will be thrilled if my daughter is fortunate enough to get a bid from any chapter let alone her legacy chapter. She is really looking forward to recruitment, I hope she finds a wonderful sisterhood.

There are still a very few schools that have bed quota, and a very very few that put a "cap" on chapter sizes (i.e. not allowing sororities to go over total/ceiling for campus, overriding NPC's quota rules) but they are definitely the exception rather than the norm.

That isn't a glass half-empty attitude, it is a smart and realistic one. :)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe schools with guaranteed placement guarantee everyone who does everything you listed- and makes it to pref night- a bid.
In other words- even at those schools- you could be dropped from everywhere before pref and then you wouldn't receive a bid.

I also think that a lot of people say "maximize your options" when they mean sticking with recruitment through the pref parties, since some women claim to have been cut from rush when they actually have dropped out prior to pref with one or more viable options still possible. Yes, it hurts to be cut by your favorite chapters before pref, but as we all know, opinions change, and sometimes they change a lot after pref night. A sorority that seemed just "ok" the day or two before can suddenly become "the one". Some chapters just don't shine in the hectic early rounds.

Right, that's why I said attend all parties to which you are invited. There is always the possibility that you won't be invited to ANY parties at some point.

Yep.

You don't know how many times a PNM has come here bemoaning "being cut from recruitment" but upon further questioning says "Well I had 2 houses left for Pref but I felt like I didn't fit in them so I dropped out." Not the same thing.

I get that it's your recruitment and it's up to you to do what you want. However, at many of the competitive schools that GC PNMs come from, withdrawing right before Pref pretty much means you aren't going to be Greek at all EVER (since your chances as a re-rushing sophomore are slim). I wish that a lot more PNMs at these schools would realize that.


Something else I wish PNMs thought about:

I also think that if you're at a school with chapters of at least 60-70+ or so women (random reasonably large number), chances are that you probably do "fit in" better with those 2 chapters you don't like than you think. There are too many different people for you to really say that you don't fit with either of them. You're bound to find some girls who are like you.

I could MAYBE buy the "don't fit" argument if your school has like 2 sororities and each of them has like 20 people (whom you know personally because your school has deferred recruitment). But if you're at somewhere like IU, UGA, etc. there are too many women in one chapter to really make an accurate statement about your "fit."

This seems like a ramble but I swear it made sense in my head. lol.

oh, alright sorry. :)
I was just clarifying that "guaranteed bid" does not mean "guaranteed invites to at least one party".

This is exactly why I don't buy the statement "you'll end up where you're a good fit" for PNMs at large schools. Besides the fact that it's a numbers game, the groups are too big to claim any kind of homegeneity.

But with large chapters it just increases the probability you'll 'fit' with any or most of them. The phrase is still utterly true, just not as specific as at other schools.

Most PNMs would fit into most of them, that's my point. But when someone spouts that line to a PNM who's just been cut from 12 out of 18 sororities at a competitive school after second parties, it doesn't ring true. Especially if she's in-state and in the know, she's aware that in a sorority of around 200 women, there are plenty whom she'd fit in with--and she probably already knows a bunch of them. She doesn't want or need to hear that crap about 'fits'.

I can see how at a medium or small-sized school, sororities would have "personalities" and people would clearly be able to see where they fit. That used to be true even at the big SEC schools. But...no more. Not with the massive pledge classes they have.

too true.