So.. how does informal differ from formal rush?
 

Since nobody responded to my school specific thread.. I'll ask it this way..
:D

if you do some searching and browsing through the rush forum you'll find the answers to your question :)

at my school formal rush is when you pay a fee and get to meet all the soroities at yourr school then at the end of the week you pick your top three and if your top three pick you too you choose which one you want to bid. informal is usually rcommended for sophmores and beyound even though freshman can take part in it too. at my school informal is a way to get to know more about the sorority of your choice and hanging out with them and stuff and if all goes well u get a invite to be in the sorority. you and can do informals with several different sororites before you make your decision its more laid back. hope that helps. by the way i am doing informal at my school in the spring

Not quite. You rank your top 3, in order, and this is matched with the bid lists of the chapters. Hopefully there will be a match made. You do not get to see who has listed you and "pick" from them, nor are you offered multiple bids in formal rush.

Sorry to be nitpicky, but this was misleading and I didn't want anyone to get confused.

Thanks girl!! I thought I had explained it right but thanks for making it clear:)

informal vs. formal
 

at some schools, formal recruitment is more structured, with a set schedule for the first party round.at the information session all the pnms would be divided into recruitment groups. you might play some icebreaker games and then your recruitment counselor would explain how it is going to work and she would go over the schedule for first party round. the next morning you would all meet your r.c. and begin visiting the sororities. you have a list, or your recruitment counselor has the list and herds your whole group to a specific sorority house at a specific time, and then to the next one on the list and so forth and so on. you would visit all the sororities during the first round of parties. after first party round is over, the sororities would decide to whom they wish to extend an invitation to their second party and they turn in their invitations to panhellenic. you would meet with your recruitment group and your counselor and she would discreetly distribute everyones invitations. you would go thru your invitations privately and either accept or decline the invitations. because everyone in your recruitment group maight not be invited to every second round party, each pnm will receive their own schedule of parties and what thime they are to be a what house, and each will go independently to those parties. after second round, the sororities will again decide who they are going to ask to third party rounds and then you will be able to accept or decline the invitations. this whittling down process continues until after the preferential party round. if the particular school has a maximum of three pref parties, you have the possibility to attend all three, providing you are still getting the maximum number of invitations after each round. after pref, round, you would rank the sororities you visited that night, first choice, second, third choice. meanwhile the sororities are busy arranging their bid lists and hopefully your first choice has you on their first bid list.

during informal, you most likely would register with panhellenic, so that sororities participating in informal would know you are interested and available. some colleges have you visit each participating group the first night and then the sororities issue their own invitations, either via mouth, email, phone or a real handwritten invitation. other colleges just give the list of interested and available women to each participating sorority and the sororities contract them at their own discretion. usually there is a window of time when informal should be completed. however if a chapter is not at total, theoritically they could continue meeting girls and issuing bids until they reached campus total.

please understand that this is just a gemeral explaination of how it works and that on your campus it might be different. your best bet would be to stop by the panhellenic office and get the lowdown from them, or if you know any girls in sororities you could ask them. that way they would know you are interested!

good luck, and let us know how it goes. lisa

Great summary, Lisa!

Let me add a couple of things:

You can only receive one bid during formal recruitment. After pref, you rank the sororities whose pref parties you attended, and the sororities rank the PNMs who attended their prefs. The lists are compared, and hopefully you match and receive a bid from one of your three choices. (But there's always a possibility that you won't match even if you attended pref and turned in your ranking.)

During informal recruitment, you can visit more than one sorority and receive more than one bid. If you do receive more than one bid, you can only accept one.

Not every sorority will participate in informal. Any sorority that is at or over total (a "maximum" number of members) and met quota in the last formal recruitment (a "maximum" number of bids that each sorority may extend during FR) won't hold informal.

faugirl, take a look around the rush and recruitment stories forums for more details. There's a wealth of information.