[jenidallas]

During the late spring of my senior year, I had the opportunity to attend a campus day at the college. They divided us into groups. We also made friends with an athletic girl from out of town who hoped to be a walk-on for the basketball team and a girl in our group who looked like a pageant queen, who informed me that her older sister was a former president of the Tigers and a past campus queen of everything (homecoming queen, Miss University, student government, fraternity sweetheart, etc.). Our guide for the visit was a Lion who was wearing her chapter letters and did not take well to this news when she found out she knew the older sister and this made things somewhat uncomfortable for us all. I also remember we walked past a group of Tigers all wearing letters having a lovely picnic on the lawn right by where our tour group was walking (I now know that was clearly planned), basket and blankets and all. This also agitated our tour guide and she seemed upset that the Tigers were waving at us as we walked by.

We toured a residence hall and the room we toured was one of a Lion and Tiger who lived together. It looked like an entire Greek store and the Ralph Lauren catalog had both thrown up in there… letters and generally Southern preppiness everywhere. I decided on the spot that I absolutely needed to be Greek because I wanted a room that looked just like that (yes, seriously… that was my first “I must join a sorority” moment – shallow, right?!). The pageant queen was going to live at home and athletic girl and I decided to change our housing reservations to be roommates, planning over lunch what our own room décor would be. We all three agreed to go through rush together in the fall.

I only met one Bear on my visit – she was a very quiet girl wearing giant glasses (she reminded me of an owl and to this day, which is how I remember her) and was president of the pre-law society as well as president of Bears. I was not left with much of an impression of her other than that and my mother scolded me for judging the chapters based on what she thought were superficial impressions and told me I didn’t see the Bears because they were all off getting ready for their chapter formal that night.

I secured recommendations for Tigers (a friend’s mom was president of the local alumnae) and I was a legacy for Bears but my mother also had two other friends write recs for me. I did not know any Lions and had difficulty finding a Lion via our local alumnae Panhellenic.