[jenidallas]

We moved onto campus about ten days before classes started. Rush would not start for about ten days after that so we had almost three weeks before rush to get to know others on campus. We had three dormitories – one co-ed and one each men’s/women’s. The single-sex dorms were two rooms connected by a shared bathroom. The co-ed dorms had much larger rooms with big closets and moveable furniture but had older communal bathrooms. Most of the people in Greek life lived in the single-sex dorms but there were a couple of Bears and a couple of Lions living in our dorm. All the Tigers lived in the single-sex dorm. The co-ed dorm was largely exchange students and athletes. I found out after getting to campus that the co-ed dorm was NOT the desirable one for several reasons but I enjoyed the opportunity to live with a diverse group of students.

My roommate and I quickly became friends with two other girls down the hall. Both had been competitive cheerleaders in high school so I’ll refer to them as the cheerleaders. One of them dated a basketball player who lived upstairs. My roommate was friends with a baseball player from high school. Those guys plus their teammate/roommates became our little clique… the eight of us ate all our meals together in the one dining hall for the university and hung out together at all of the campus activities. We noticed similar cliques forming as we navigated campus – there was a clique of six girls from the women’s dorm too. I knew three of the girls (two went to my high school and one had gone to Russia with me) and so we talked to them often. The lived in the same wing of their hall (four were suitemates and the other two across the hall) and were all going through rush too. They would often make comments about being a “package deal” for whichever sorority they would join. This worried me as it was a small campus where quota would likely be somewhere between 6 and 12.

The men were already having fraternity rush and we were often invited to their events. The president of Tigers was the sweetheart of one fraternity and encouraged us to go to some of their parties the last time we talked to her before summer ended – and sure enough, invitations to various parties addressed to me started arriving in my mailbox. Silence started with campus move-in so we would see sorority women but they could not speak to us. They would do ridiculous things though like say things very loudly that they would hope we would hear (like they were talking to us in the third person) or tell someone else (usually one of the guys) to tell us something. It reminded me of junior high.

At fraternity events, I saw lots of Tigers and Lions but never any Bears. In fact, I still rarely saw Bears. This, my mother said, was because they actually followed Rush rules and were busy doing sisterhood things. I did not have a good impression of Bears though because I only had seen two of them – the owl-glassed president and a very awkward one who lived on my hall who always seemed to make awkward comments around us.

We started classes and registered for recruitment which would start at the end of the second week of classes. We would have Open House parties (20 minutes each) on a Friday afternoon, Skit parties (30 minutes each) on a Saturday afternoon, and Preference parties (45 minutes each) on a Sunday afternoon. Our university allowed up to three parties per round so it was possible for a rushee to never be released from a house. The chapters did not have specific numbers that the chapters had to release either. They also would allow rushees to decline any invitation after the first round so women could decide not to go back to a house or drop out of rush entirely. The bid list would be posted at noon on Monday and bid day would start at 4 pm.

My mom had been appointed chapter advisor of Bears over the summer so we agreed that we would not talk from the start of rush until Bid Day unless I saw her at a party so no one thought we were breaking rush rules.