[SylvanAerie]

There are a number of threads on here about women who went through recruitment a second time and did well. Often their first choice the second year was different than their first year’s. You grow up a lot in a year, and your perspective changes. It’s cool if you find your Prince Charming, er, House Charming, but it’s not necessary in order to have a good Greek experience. When I went through I was clueless about recruitment and sororities. I thought they were all elite. I was on a competitive campus, I didn’t know to get any recs, I was an OOS transfer and didn’t know anyone, and was technically a Junior going through formal freshman recruitment. I had a snowball’s chance, yes?

I ended up with two houses for pref. There were only a handful of girls in each I would have chosen to sit next to in the cafeteria in HS, but there WERE those 10 or so, so I accepted a bid. It’s at least as many as I would have been close friends with in a 972-person dorm where everyone pretty much lived in their own world. There were 30,000 students on my campus. No one cared where I lived or what groups I was a member of. The house – the thing you live in – was drop dead charming, and I felt like I really contributed something to the growth of the chapter. I found good friends; and the structure pushed me to be a better student, more involved in the community, and made me learn how to manage a project successfully, a skill I have needed time after time.

After I became an alum I realized that the one I chose had a stellar national reputation with elite chapters all over the place, many of which I probably wouldn’t have gotten into, and I had accidentally acquired membership in an organization that I was way proud to be a member of. When I joined my alum chapter it felt like going through recruitment and getting a bid from the most outstanding chapter on campus!

Every chapter here has a strong national presence, and the four or five weakest at Bama are among the strongest nationally. Even if you end up choosing the second time around the one you dropped the first time, you will find the ‘lifetime’ thing means finding sisters all over the country that make you proud to be a member. Good luck and best wishes.