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Originally posted by AchtungBaby80
As for what others have said about working to change your chapter's reputation...in all honesty, I don't know if you can change the reputation of your chapter, at least in a time span of only a couple years. My chapter was the smallest when I joined because it had just been recolonized, so a lot of rushees didn't even consider it and we didn't mix with the "top" fraternities. Five years later, we're still considered "middle-tier" at best even though we can compete with the top sororities on numbers, looks, grades, activities, etc.
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Agreed -- I think a lot of people are just not being realistic here. I went to a school that is by no means as competitive as Texas. Even here, it is very difficult to change a chapter's reputation -- it takes many, many years. There are a couple of sororities here that have reputations as the "fat" chapters because 10 or 20 years ago they were smaller groups that took the bigger girls. Now they have fewer plus-size girls than most of the middle-tier or even some of the highest-tier groups that are regarded as uniformly beautiful, but they still suffer from the rep. If someone gave you photographs of every sorority and asked you to pick out which one was regarded as the fat chapter, I bet you couldn't do it.
Now fortunately my school is one of those schools where basically every fraternity will mix with every sorority, so every sorority has a pretty active social life. The only time a sorority ever really has trouble with their social lives is when they're on probation. I don't think any group really suffers all that much because of reputation.
This is not the case everywhere.
There are too many people who assume that suffering from a bad reputation on campus has no effect on the individuals in that group. For these people, I will once again reference my friend that joined the "fat" chapter at a competitive Southern school because she loved the girls. The way her chapter was treated within the Greek system led to a relapse of the eating disorder that she suffered from in high school because she became convinced that she was fat even though she wasn't. Does this make her a weak, insecure person with no self-esteem? Maybe -- I won't argue that here. Do I think that joining the chapter she genuinely loved was worthwhile in her case? Not when it contributed to health complications that will follow her for the rest of her life. She ended up leaving the Greek system in order to focus on her health, and she only got better after she left the system that made her weight such a huge focus of her life. (And I understand how she feels because I ended up going early alum after Greek drama -- unrelated to reputation, but still unnecessarily petty -- began affecting my mental health and my grades.)
While "following your heart" and all that jazz is good stuff, that alone doesn't make it worth it. You have to weigh whether or not the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. As Greeks, we'd like to believe that they always do, but that's not the case.