[Kevin]

IFC Advisor, what a lot of people have said here is relatively true. I'm on the advisory board for my chapter (thank God I have little to do with Rush), but I observed some interesting things this year. I was able to attend Rush up at Oklahoma University where the student body is around 34-35K. They have a COMPLETELY formal Rush. Rushees are split up into groups of around 20 and led from house to house where they get around 25 minutes each. I believe there are around 30 houses. It's up to these houses to get in contact with these guys and recruit them. Obviously with only 25 minutes exposure, the system hugely favors the larger houses. IFC chapters there range from 4 to around 200+. I think the average house takes around 20 during formal recruitment.

My alma mater is a school of about 16000. I think only around 200 men went through recruitment this year. We only have 6 IFC groups, so we are a little more flexible. I kind of liked how everything worked. On Monday night, there was a formal presentation at the University Center. Each group presented to about 20 men at a time. There was a maximum number of members allowed to be in the room during the presentation, so everyone was able to start off on a fairly even playing field.

Summer Rush is allowed -- THAT IS HUGE. My chapter already had a long list of prospects on the first day of Rush and we had already had extensive contact with many of them. We had 21 bids accepted on the first day of Rush as a result of our work over the Summer as a result of this -- guys that we had contacted, but didn't end up bidding probably went to other houses. Had we never had contact with them, they probably wouldn't have rushed in the first place. I think the practice of "off-season" recruitment is a HUGE plus for the whole campus.

Seeing that you have deferred recruitment, this is an excellent opportunity for houses to recruit guys and setup their lists during that first semester. That's almost like giftwrapping a bunch of guys ready to sign and then giving plenty of time to evaluate them before extending bids. If houses on your campus aren't taking huge advantage of this, they REALLY need to.

Back to our system...

The rest of the "formal" process is pretty informal. On the back of the bid cards are squares containing the names of each house on campus. The rushee must obtain the stamp of each house for a bid card to be valid. This means that if nothing else, they have to give every house on campus at least two shots at them. The process takes all week. Fraternities are responsible for being in their houses or wherever they're rushing from from 8 to 11 each evening. Rush is completely dry. The IFC advisor makes her rounds 'dropping in' on each party to make sure everything's going okay.

The rules are set up so that as much as possible, the rushee ends up having an opportunity to find out as much about each house before signing. I think that's particularly helpful for the smaller groups.

The next week, they allow informal rush. The rushees may still get their bid cards signed, etc. If the bid cards are not turned in by Friday that week, the tardy fraternity won't be able to include the grades or be able to use their new members in intramurals.