[jenidallas]

Over the summer I had an internship and made friends with many other college interns. One day one of the guys was asking if I planned to go through rush at my school and I blurted out that yes, I was and that I thought I would either be a Tiger or a Bear. This was received with some muffled giggles from the other end of the table. “Oh, we will have to introduce you to someone tomorrow!” one of them said with a laugh. The next day, a pretty petite perfect-looking blonde was at our table and the same guy introduced me – “she is president of Tigers on your campus, the sorority you think you might join.” I was mortified as I knew enough to know that you didn’t go around telling people what sorority you thought you would join… but luckily she was very nice. She gave me a bit of information about rush and her impressions of other groups on the campus (which to an impressionable 19 year old stuck with me for a bit). A lot of it was different than what my mother had told me but I soaked it all up anyhow. I went home that night and told my mother about the experience and she did not seem at all impressed and reminded me that I might want to be careful about talking to chapter members so I didn’t do anything to jeopardize my own rush.

I ended up having lunch with her a couple of times a week during the summer but tried to not have my mom find out about it. One day a couple of the women in my department saw us and that afternoon they paid a visit to my desk to ask where I was going to school in the fall. I told them and they smiled and said they were both Lions who had graduated a couple of years prior and they wanted to make sure their sisters got a chance to know me too as I seemed to be spending a lot of time with a certain Tiger. They also both offered to write me recs. Yay! The next week, a few of the Lion girls came to go to lunch with these ladies and they brought them by and introduced them to me. They did not invite me to lunch with them however - they said this would be "breaking the rules" and they didn't want me to get kicked out of Rush. This immediately made me paranoid about everything that had already happened that summer!

I also got invited to join a few of the Tigers one night to do something with them (a summer sisterhood, they called it). I was delighted that my pageant-queen friend was also invited and we made sure to also talk to them about my future roommate too as she lived too far away to come up on a weeknight and we felt bad that we were getting a chance to talk to actives while she was not there. I did tell my mom about that as I wanted to make sure I didn't break any rules. She sighed and told me that it would be the sorority that got in trouble, not me, since we had not even registered for recruitment but to be sure I knew what I was doing.

I met one Bear over the summer but she was a fifth-year senior and told me she was no longer active. She told me that the sorority reputations frequently changed and that “Bears used to be different” when she pledged. I wondered what she meant by that but didn’t think to ask her. I asked my mom who pursed her lips and told me to stop listening to gossip.