MIT Considering Fall Sorority Recruitment
 

Panhellenic sororities (NPC) at MIT will vote December 5 on whether to move recruitment to the fall. The November 29 student paper has an article giving several viewpoints on the pros and cons of fall versus deferred recruitment.

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V125/N57/57panhel.html

Near the end of the article, some IFC concerns are mentioned. Apparently some guys are worried that if NPC and IFC recruitment occur at the same time, it will affect "rush-girl programs at fraternities . . . ."

This must be a first for a major NE campus.

Actually, MIT had fall formal recruitment up until four years ago.

I think it'll be a good move, as long as it doesn't happen at the same time as academic orientation and everything else, the way it used to. Under the old system, everything happened at once - during your first few days on campus, you were exposed to fraternity rush, sorority rush, independent living group rush (think coed fraternities), dorm rush (you visited all the dorms before ranking them, instead of just being preassigned somewhere), academic orientation, activities orientation (where you found out about extracurricular activities other than greek life), and the start of practice for the fall sports teams - on top of possibly being away from home and family for the first time ever.

I see they're looking at early September. That could work nicely. They'd take advantage of the fact that Monday is Labor Day and Tuesday is Registration Day, when hardly anything is scheduled.

how can students attend classes and do formal recruitment at the same time? Do they just visit one or two house a day of do they do it on the weekends? At my school, we need the last week of winter break to finish rush.

See, but I couldn't imagine having to go to school during break to go through recruitment. At Maryland, it's done right away during the spring and is in the evenings and the weekend.

Ditto here. You'd never get anyone to rush at my school if they had to take time out of their break or move in early.

We had 11 sororities. You'd visit 5 Thursday night, 6 Friday night. Saturday was first invites, then Sunday was second invite, then Monday night was pref and Tuesday night bid day.

MIT tried deferred recruitment two different ways. The first time they tried deferred recruitment, parties were held on two consecutive weekends - the weekend just prior to the start of the spring semester, and the following weekend. A lot of PNMs dropped out during the week in between. So, after that, they scheduled recruitment for six days, starting on Wednesday of the first week of classes. Work loads are generally pretty light during the first week of classes, so PNMs can still complete their assignments and get to recruitment events.

Before that, when we still did fall formal recruitment, all freshmen were required to be on campus starting roughly two weeks before classes started. There were mandatory academic orientation programs going on at the same time as rush and everything else. So it wasn't like freshmen PNMs were being told to cut their summer two weeks short - they had to be around for orientation anyway. Upperclass PNMs did have to arrange for an early return and cut their summer short in order to rush, but a fair number of upperclassmen returned early anyway for other reasons.

This is sort of how Otterbein's deferred works, although we're in session when it happens (first few weeks of Winter Quarter, so it is light). But I agree that it is difficult to hang on to the girls during the week. As a PX last year, it was very hard to get the girls to remember our meetings and to get with them to give them invites and to get them to show up for their parties. It may have made the academics easier, but it was a pain on the rush side.