[PhoenixAzul]

Our girls are not allowed to wear letters until after initiation becuase as several people have said, they do not understand their connotations and history. THe other thing is that if a girl DOES decide to drop or leave school, she has a set of letters laying around that end up in goodwill or as a dust rag, and that's no good. But the ceremony and tradition of bigs getting shirts for littles is very exciting...typically the girls recieve letters in their "family fabric", to represent their branch of the tree (mine is a crazy bright hawaiian print!) and they get a hunk of fabric to use for their own stuff or to hand down to their future littles.

Until then, they have stuff that says TAU DELTA written out, but they are to avoid using the greek letters. Motto, mascot, flower, colors, names, phrases, everything else is fair game, but the letters are for later. When designing their class shirts (one of their first tasks as a group), that is the material they have to work with. The tradition of designing the year's shirts is awesome...I have a couple of hand-me-down pledge class shirts that are hillarious and cute. THe active chapter usually buys them too, as its cheaper than getting huge orders of letters or what have you. Other chapters here give the girls their class shirts, I think ours are the only ones who design their own.

Also, we use the term Pledge. You are a Pledge until you are initiated. "New Member" refers to your FIRST ACTIVE YEAR (for me, my Soph. year). As this is the first time as a member you are going through rush, organizing events, and having the full burden of membership.