Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeEllis
I had another thread over in Greek Life where I asked for some information I needed to write my part of scripts for a potential TV show. The details are there, if you want to check on my veracity. People were really informative and helpful, but that thread seems to have died. Hence, this new one...
I've moved on to the next part of this scripting process: what goes on after our boy Steven accepts a bid and becomes a pledge. I've been interviewing a few guys here locally about this, but I thought -- as you people were so informative and helpful before -- that I'd put my questions here, too. Please respond to as many or as few as you want.
- If there's a PM that several houses are rushing pretty hard, once he's accepted at bid to one house, how do the other houses find out about it? At my school, it was pretty informal, with actives just running into the guy on campus and noticing that he was wearing a pledge pin from some other house. But I imagine that on larger campuses, there could be published lists of each house's new pledges. Does this sound reasonable? What other ways does the news get circulated?
- During the pledge training period, how much time is a pledge expected to spend at his fraternity house? How many days each a week is he expected to put in an appearance? How many hours a week?
- How is the time spent? In a typical week, how many hours are pledges expected to work on the house? How many hours in required study periods? How much time in a typical week is spent in some kind of pledge training class?
- Finally, and this is really specific: I've discovered a device that some fraternity uses to chart how hard each pledge is working to get to know the brothers. They call it The Matrix, and it's a big grid with pledges' name across the top and the brothers' names along the side. When someone feels they've "gotten to know" someone else, they initial the box where their names intersect. Once all the boxes contain two sets of initials, they know that every pledge has made an effort to get to know every brother and vice versa.
I really want to include some of these conversations in the script, maybe show our guy working his butt off to talk to every guy, asking pretty much the same questions over and over. I think it could be a funny sequence in the script. Does anyone want to suggest what kinds of things a pledge would be expected to know about the brothers? I can make reasonable guesses, but you all have more experience at this than I do.
Thanks in advance for any help.
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1. In my house, the Rush Chairman had a list of all outstanding bids, like a Sales Funnel Report, with where the person was in his decision process. It was the Rush Chair's responsibility to know if we had a pledge locked in or if we were going to lose him to another house.
2 & 3. Depends on the house. Some houses require a pledge to be only at meetings, functions, or dinner. Other require every hour when the pledge is not in class or sleeping or studying. At a minimum, most have a weekly pledge meeting to attend.
4. We use a small black book that had a page for each active. It had at a minimum each actives name, major, and hometown info on it but you could add any other info you wanted to remember (that got bonus points). When you did something good or crappy, an active could write a comment and associate points with the comment. (Like +20 because you bought me a beer, or -15 because you called me an ass). You had to complete the pages as a pledge, and keep a 0 or positive balance of points. It was a certainty that if you had a negative point balance with an active brother that you were in trouble and needed to fix the issue.
A pledge had to carry the book around on his person at all times (like wearing a pledge pin), and was to present it to any active who asked for it. The best thing I saw was one pledge who had girls sign the book for him (and you can imagine what they said).