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I haven't been around for too long (I'm only a sophomore), and I've only been Greek for a few months. But I can tell you from what I know, the Greek system at my school (at least with the sororities) did much better this year than in the past. Last year, my chapter had 12 new members (I'm pretty sure) and this year it's 36 new members!!
Also, I can tell you the reason my friends and I chose not to go Greek last year. In retrospect it was pretty funny. I was very supportive of fraternities - I practically forced all my guy friends to go to the rush events. But, I wasn't interested at all in sororities. I didn't understand why anyone would want to spend so much time and money on friends that you could have anyway. Also, I think people are right about the "individuality" thing. I saw sororities as the perfect example of almost "mob mentality" - a bunch of girls who look, think, act the same way. Two of my friends DID go through formal recruitment, and they both stopped going after the first round, because they were so turned off by the formality of the whole thing. I became very close with girls from one of the two sororities on our campus after recruitment was over. As time went on, I got pretty mad at myself for not doing recruitment, because they seemed to always have so much fun doing all of their pledging stuff, and were really just cool girls. It wasn't until the end of the year that I decided that I wanted to be a part of it, and I resolved to go through formal recruitment the following year. I did, and actually, I ended up joining the OTHER sorority (funny how things work out...)
So the moral of the story is, I wasn't necessarily anti-Greek. But I was certainly anti-sorority. I guess you could say that I didn't buy into the hype about fraternities (but that might be in part because I was hanging out at one of the frats a lot from day one), but for some reason I DID buy into the hype about sororities. It might be because I'm at a school that's about 78% male, so most girls here tend to get along better with guys. But, I had to really get to know those girls before I understood that there is a difference between being friends and being sisters.
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