Warning: loads of sad personal stuff ahead
I started college as a freshman in Fall 1995 at California State University Long Beach. The sororities didn't advertise much and so I don't recall hearing about rush. Honestly, I don't think I would have gone anyway. Plus, one of my friends is a really liberal thinker and she was really anti-greek and I didn't want to get into it with her.
However, I decided not to form an opinion without seeing for myself so I went to informal recruitment my sophomore year. So, in the Spring of 1997 I rushed during Continuous Open Bidding at CSULB. There are seven sororties at CSULB and all of them were participating in informal recruitment.
Shortly after I arrived home that first night at COB, I received a phone call from the chapter president of
Dralion who extended to me an invitation to join. I was quite pleased, and surprised that I would get a bid so quickly! The ladies at
Dralion were really diverse, nice and very sincere and I liked them a lot. However, out of fairness to two other sororities I promised to visit, I asked if I could take a couple days to decide. The
Dralion President thought that was ok.
Over the weekend, a situation at home caused me to think carefully about whether or not I should join a sorority at all. You see, my mother was an alcoholic who had been sober for several years. Right after I left for college, she relapsed and was not recovering. That semester in particular, her health was getting significantly worse. I realized that weekend that I was beginning to feel a lot of stress from home. Considering that I was already quite involved on campus, I figured that accepting a bid to a sorority might not be the best idea. With that, I sent a note and politely declined my bid to
Dralion. It's a good thing that I did. Later that semester, things got so bad for us that I ended up failing all of my classes and earning zero credits. I was put on academic probabtion.
I wanted to rush again in the fall, but I knew I ought to spend my energy on improving my grades - and things were worsening for my mom. (Besides, my GPA at that time was not high enough to qualify for membership anyway). Things just went kinda poorly for the whole of 1998 too. One of those things being that my major got eliminated and I was going to have to start all over on a new major.
In December 1998 my mom was hospitalized for a short while. In February of 1999 my mother passed away unexpectedly in a devastating turn of events. Six weeks later my grandmother (her mom) also passed away. Obviously, I didn't do informal rush that semester, nor did I do formal rush in fall 1999.
It took a lot of perseverence, but I made up my mind to pull myself together and get my grades back up. In no time, I returned to earning the high marks I always knew I was capable of. Within two semesters, I was earning 3.6 GPA semesters - but my overall GPA was still a bit shaky. Then, when I was talking to an academic counselor about my academic probation being lifted, she found out about my sad circumstance. She informed me that the university had a policy whereby the university could have that spring 1997 term (where I failed all my classes) permanently erased from my record if the circumstances warranted it - which she thought mine did. After submitting a petition, the university graciously approved my petition for a "retroactive withdrawl" and my spring 1997 term is no longer on my transcript AT ALL. That put my overall GPA up a little bit.
The year 1999 - 2000 was more about healing and moving on than it was about rushing a sorority...so I didn't even consider it then. However, my last year, 2000 - 2001, I was feeling positive about my life and I decided to take a chance and try for fall 2000 formal recruitment. I figured they'd just laugh at me for being a 5th year super-duper-senior, but I wanted to go for it anyway.
Unfortunately, my rush counselor didn't seem to care about me at all. I couldn't go to the informational night as I just could not get out of work from my on-campus job. Though, I managed to take my lunch break right at the start of that event and went over to the student union to meet with my rush counselor. She was completely unprepared and simply didn't have any of my paperwork ready. She didn't even have a schedule to give me. She told me she would call me that night to tell me when the first round was starting the next day. She didn't call and I missed it. Then, when I did finally get a hold of her, she pretty much encouraged me to drop out! So, no sorority then either.