Old Squirrel New Rush Tricks
 

Ok...be kind to me, please.

Can some of you nice ladies please enlighten me as to what all comprises rush these days??

When I was a undergrad (pledged almost 14 years ago--ack!!) we did rush like this:

2 days of round 1;
1 day of tour day;
1 day of meal day; (This was our best day...All that Jazz was the theme and we were known for this party totally...)
Preference Night

When I was a junior they banned bursting from the houses...

When I was a senior they started talking about "No frills rush" in the panhellenic circles and limited budgets and cut out meal day and what was allowed to be served to the rushees...

Now rush is called "recruitment" and snap pledging or informal rush is now called COB it seems...

Do women still dress alike during rush and entertain with skits or videos or just how do they rush now?

Sorry to sound so dense and out of touch, but I haven't a clue any more...

Okay, first the terminology:

Rush = Recruitment

Rushee = Potential New Member (PNM)

Pledging = Pledging

Pledge = New Member (NM)

Pledge Period = NM Period

Pledge Ed. = NM Ed.

Snap Pledging = Snap Bidding

Informal Rush = Continuous Open Bidding (COB) or Informal Recruitment

Suicide = Single Intentional Preference (SIP)

Second, the process:

The number of houses and structure of the parties varies from school to school depending on the size and attitude of the Greek system. The last round is still Preference round as you knew it. The first round is usually some sort of "Go Greek" theme. If chapters are housed, then one round will include house tours. There's also usually a philanthropy round, where sisters and PNMs make some sort of craft to go to the chapter's philanthropy (e.g. stuffed animals for the children's hospital, emergency kits for the women's shelter). The structure of the rest of the rounds is up to the individual school's Panhellenic Council.

Third, no-frills rush:

There's been a huge push lately to purge recruitment of all the frills that many see as clouding the sisterhood. The three biggies are decorations, skits, and food. There's often a limit as to what chapters can put up for decorations, and you're less likely to see fountains with live Koi, canopies, or ice sculptures anymore.

At some schools (like mine), "no-frills" can mean eliminating skits entirely and instead presenting a video or slide show during the first night. At other schools, they have "Skit Night" but use short videos/slide shows in lieu of skits and spend most of their time on conversation. Other schools still have mega-skits.

For food, things are similarly dressed down. Many schools have adopted "Ice Water Teas" for first round, so named because the chapters may only serve ice water (often with a twist of fruit). Others allow punch, hors d'oeuvres, or desserts. Very few chapters still have a formal, sit-down dinner.

Most Panhellenics now have a limit on recruitment budgets, a limit that often includes donations from alumnae, which is geared to diminish the advantages that larger, wealthier chapters would have over smaller, poorer ones. Again, the limit and rules vary from school to school; my school's limit is $550, whereas other schools are in the five-digit arena.

The goal of all of this is to encourage conversation and a match between PNM and sorority based on personality and feeling. I personally am a fan.

Fourth, clothes:

Yes, most of us still dress alike (or at least similarly). There are still guidelines for what PNMs should wear. Recruitment has not become an entirely casual event. It's still (second to Initiation) the most important part of a sorority's year. All these regulations want to do is discourage shallow selection and encourage a process focused on personality and sisterhood.

Edited for clarification and grammar.

Rachel -

I pledged in '86, so **high five**. :)

There was an article in our sorority mag maybe 10 years ago about eliminating skits, decorations and such. It has definitely not gone away depending on the school...from what I hear the big southern rushes have not changed one iota.

Kappa Kitty...

Thank you so much for taking the time to 'splain to me all the ends and outs of the rush changes.

I too am a fan of this...I, as a panhellenic delegate, supported this when they were talking about these changes. Being from Idaho we are about as laid back as we can be...conversation and not entertainment should be the focus. No frills can also encourage ladies to go through rush that wouldn't have if it was still such a facade.

Take care and thanks for your great reply...

Hey, no prob! It's always helpful to have alumnae wanting to learn about the new terms and procedures. So many are counterproductive (e.g. "I miss skits! It's stupid that we can't have them anymore!" or "So then there was this rushee... I mean potential pledge... I mean... aw, this is dumb!") and stuck in the mud that I'm more than happy to help someone learn the new terminology.

Heck, it was only about a year or so ago that our Recruitment Advisor finally got the rest of our alumnae trained to say "recruitment," "PNM," and the like.

:D

Just wanted to add, not all sororities use the term "pledging"....I know that ADPi does not use the term pledge or pledging at all anymore, since we have Alphas (NM), Deltas (Initiated members), and Pis (alumni members) :)

At my university, we had four rounds: Open "House" (really open chapter room), Philanthropy, Skit (yes, we did do a skit!), and Preference)

I guess our university has what you'd all call "frills" recruitment (it doesn't seem very frilly to me, but that's my personal take on it!) We served ice water first round, McDonald's orange punch second round, root beer/cola third round, and sparkling cider and cake fourth round. Decorations tended to be pretty simple the first two rounds, and then third and fourth rounds were a lot more elaborate.

I believe Recruitment budget at our school is $1000 for everything, so the Formal Recruitment chairs need to turn in receipts for EVERYTHING that is used for this week....not doing so can mean a fine for the chapter from Panhellenic.

We still encourage conversations and a feeling of "fitting" within a chapter even with all the "frills" of our recruitment. I think we just want to make the PNM's see a little more about our sisterhood than they'd get with such shortened recruitment parties (I think the longest ones are 50 or 55 minutes long for preference night).

We have to dress similarly every night (skit night is the only exception for those actually IN the skit), and we even start it the first round where every sorority is assigned Panhellenic shirts with the theme for recruitment on them and then every sorority listed on the back of the shirts (each sorority is given a different color of text on the front of their shirts to differentiate between the chapters).

(KKC, I don't want you to think I'm jumping on everything you said, I just wanted to add perspective from another university and sorority :) )

No NPC sorority uses the term "pledge" anymore. It's kind of a no-no. "New member" is the replacement, by unanimous agreement by all 26 members of the NPC.
http://www.deltagamma.org/recruitment_terminology.shtml

Yes, I realize that lots of us still use it in day to day conversation...what can I say, old habits die hard.

Then what do you call the actual process? New membering? Sorry, this is why I don't care for the new terms at all...

Also, Theta Phi Alpha does use the term "pledge sister."

I meant for the actual formal pledging ceremony and the verb... I'm "pledging" a sorority; I'm not "new membering" a sorority.

I completely understand using it as the verb; I was just stating that ADPi doesn't even use it as the verb. New members have "joined" the sorority....there is no "pledging" period whatsoever.

And to add another perspective-- as an alumna of Valpo (albeit from the Delta Chi Epsilon local that became ADPi), recruitment during 1992-1995 was crazy!

* One weekend we had a "mini-carnival" in one of the dining halls, with toss-ball-in-milk-can setups and cheesy mini prizes

* another year we had a decades-of-music skit event in the basement of a fraternity house (the guys weren't around, but still!)

* we often had a semi-formal pre-pref night, with another skit, in the refectory of a campus classroom building

* one year our theme party, on our dorm corridor, was a casino night where we played craps, poker, blackjack, and had a mocktails bar

* preference was often at Casa Del Roma, a nice restaurant a few miles from the University, with fraternity men in shirts and ties driving the rushees to the party!

* All of these had theme-related nametage, like the roses for theme night, where you had to cut out the yellow, write the person's name, cut out the green, glue them together, then use gold glitter paint to outline the darned thing. Times 100. Per party.

The whole thing was three weeks my first two years, and two weeks the last two years (only one party per night mid-week, with more on the weekends; it was five rounds of informal, fun day, semiformal, theme day in CR or on corridor, and preference)

Compared to that, Valpo's current formal recruitment is relatively no-frills, though there are still skits and actual beverages and food throughout the week. When I arrived for skit night last year, to help out, I was completely shocked. So PolarPi, be glad you weren't here for the crazy 90's! I think our budget was only $1000 then, though it went a little farther with 1990s dollars...