[ASTalumna06]

Again, the problem on campus is that girls aren't exactly running at the chance to join a sorority. Everyone in my chapter will tell you that they never thought they'd join a sorority, and the only reason they did is because one of their friends was a sister, or one of their friends was friends with a sister and told them they should definitely go.

When I was Panhellenic President in 2006, I started what we call our "kick-off" recruitment party in the spring (they're now trying to do it in the fall, also), where all 3 sororities get together in the student union, and put on 3 separate parties, 3 different times for 3 different groups of PNMs, who are required to attend all the parties. From what I understand, this is very similar to how formal recruitment works. The problem is, half of the PNMs who attend are recruited through one of the sororities, and there's never more than 10 girls that show up.

Would formal recruitment help? Maybe. But that's a huge process to establish a formal recruitment system when there's never been one here before. And to be honest, I don't think that one of the sororities would go for it, because their new member classes are usually twice the size of the other two, and I really don't think they'd risk losing that.

On top of that, we're a satellite campus for a much larger school. After 2 years, students from our campus can automatically transfer to the main campus. That one sorority that always gets larger numbers... a reason they do is because a few girls actually do their research and find out that this particular sorority is the only one with a chapter at the main campus. I don't know if these PNMs think they can just transfer to the main campus and join the other chapter, but they end up going with them.

Am I using it as an excuse as to why we don't get more girls? No. We obviously need to improve recruitment methods. But I don't know if that sorority would go for changing the entire system, running the risk that they might not get the numbers they want and might not be the "dominating" chapter on campus.

And I know that "events" don't always produce results, which is why I said that the girls are slowly moving away from that. I'm looking for a variety of activities they can do in order to keep PNMs around.