Quote:
Originally Posted by pearlbubbles
I'm a little confused; so the sororities this school only do/have always only done COB?
I'm not really sure how this would work. But I think that there definitely needs to be some sort of Panhel meeting to acclimate everyone to the new process.
PNMs only visiting events they want to sounds like my campus' informal recruitment. But for formal, how can you know if you're in the correct place if you haven't met every chapter? I certainly wouldn't have been able to decide the correct house for me based on my post-high school inklings.
|
Yes, we only have COB at the moment. We just bid whoever we want, whenever we want. We do still have a "bid day" and none of the chapters are permitted to distribute bids before then, during that given semester. There is also a date given on which official recruitment parties can begin. It usually allows for 2 weeks between the start of recruitment and bid day. But bid day consists of PNMs receiving their bids (which they can receive from all three chapters), and they have 24 hours to go to the Student Activities office to sign it. The whole process has become so much more organized since I was active, but it's still a very uneventful day. After that day, you can hand out more bids if you like. My chapter would usually schedule at least one more recruitment event after bid day, which was basically by invitation only, in order to get to know any PNMs that maybe the sisters didn't get to know well enough throughout the recruitment period... because again, PNMs aren't required to attend all of our events.
I was lucky enough to end up where I was supposed to be (especially because I didn't really know what I was getting myself into in the beginning). Other girls aren't so lucky. It's not that they hate where they are... they just kind of wish they had the opportunity to look at other chapters. And yes, I have first-hand experience with someone saying this to me. Don't get me wrong; all PNMs have the opportunity to visit all three chapters (Panhellenic organizes it so that no two parties overlap), but it's almost as though you go to one party, and you just keep going back without the slightest thought about other chapters and/or without even knowing that they exist. I don't know what the Greek atmosphere is like at your school, but here, people are clueless. If you thought you didn't know a lot before you joined, I'm sure you knew 10 times as much as PNMs do here.
It's kind of funny to me that people don't understand only doing COB, because it's all I've ever known. But at the same time, I can see how it might be confusing. At other campuses, COB is used to fill open spaces, and are usually events attended by PNMs who have been personally invited. Our COB events are held in the student union (we don't have houses) and they are open to whoever would like to walk in. In the past, that didn't really happen anyway, and the only people who showed up were pretty much the people we personally invited (through a friendly "hey, you should come to this event tonight"), but they weren't people we had already met through formal. We rely very heavily on bringing in our friends, and meeting as many new people as possible.
Basically, we recruit like the fraternities.