My Retro Recruitment story

[DubaiSis]

I was so tickled by the last retro recruitment story I read, I thought it was time to think through mine! I hope you enjoy it!

I am a true child of the 80’s, graduating from high school and starting college in 1984, so it’s been a couple years ago. I will do my best to hold true to facts, but the mirror of time is definitely warped, so perceptions and misperceptions from the time may not be exactly as I remember them now. My husband and I were watching movies 5 and 6 of Harry Potter as I write this, so this is where I’ll draw my codes. There is only one name that has any correlation with the actual house, but I’m not telling! Oh, and my favorite house is my favorite character.
There were 15 chapters on my campus:
Harry
Luna
Snape
Dumbledore
Ron
Hermione
Hagrid
Belatrix
Padfoot
Neville
Ginny
He Who Must Not be Named
Mad Eye
Malfoy
Trelawney

Neither of my parents attended college but my whole life my mother started every sentence aimed at one of us (particularly my 3 sisters and me) with “after college when you…” My oldest sister (5 years older, but a 5th year senior when I was a freshman) was a member of Hermione (we’re calling her Cho) at my school and my 2nd oldest sister (we’ll call her Molly) was a colony member of Mad Eye, but had de-pledged or de-activated. I’m not quite sure at what point she decided it was too much work. She ended up dropping out of college too, so it may have just been about that. This I guess is the first memory gap, or maybe just not important enough to her to discuss.

My parents were very enthusiastic about Greek life. My mother’s thinking was that some random roommate would take no personal interest in our well-being but if we came up missing (or whatever), our sorority sisters would be out looking for us tout de suite.

As far as a little more family background, I am 4th of 5 children in close succession, 4 of whom are girls. I did NOT get along with my oldest sister Cho, a true drama queen, and her going off to college made the rest of our lives much more peaceful. Thankfully we HAVE become friends over the years, even though our Greek and life experiences have been so much different. Because of her flair for the dramatic, as well as a flair for story telling that slips well beyond factual, she enjoyed sharing stories about sorority life that turned out to be less than helpful to me. I understood that she had great friends and attended great parties, but also heard about the casket in the attic that was used in initiation (to be reborn a Hermione) and how during rush the girls had to stash notebooks around the house so that they could take careful notes about each girl they talked to as soon as they walked away. I had met some of her friends at parents’ day functions and the like and they seemed like nice enough girls.

In high school it’s not like I was a loner, but I really wasn’t bothered to be in the popular set. Over the years I have discovered that a lot of kids I grew up with considered me a friend, when I didn’t think they knew or cared that I existed. Gotta love teen angst, right? Plus, I was sick to death of high school and pretty much dumped all my friends because they just weren’t cool, but there was nobody else to replace them, so I was just alone a lot. However, it’s not like I was a Goth chick or anything. I mean, I was the captain of my cheer squad, on Yearbook staff, etc. I was, as my husband says all the time when he sees pictures of me from then, a new wave chick.

I did not have any recommendations, as far as I knew anyway; it is very possible that a few ladies sent some in on my behalf. But this pretty much states in a nutshell how prepared I was for this process. During the summer, my Mom suggested I get my hair cut (picture a somewhat modified version of the guy from A Flock of Seagulls, with my brown hair bleached red around the temples), and helped me pick some outfits to wear during rush, including lending me a very pretty solid red pure silk 2 piece dress and a pair of heels of hers for preference. During the summer, I looked through the rush booklet I got in the mail and imagined living in one of those houses (the pictures shown were only of the houses) and picturing the very sophisticated women who lived in them. One was very modern – looked like a bank, one was very Victorian looking, some were just ordinary, and a couple were beautiful old HUGE homes, like you’d see in a movie about sororities.

And speaking of movies about sororities, the night before I went off to college, I had the pleasure to go out with my Mom and one of my sisters to see one of the biggest movies of that year, Revenge of the Nerds. My first take away piece of advice for an 18 year old girl about to go off to college: do NOT go see this movie right before embarking on this life change. It was the first time I ever had the first thought that there were different status levels in sorority houses. On the up-side, one of the Omega Mus was a high school friend of both of my older sisters, but they didn’t know she had been an extra in this movie, filmed at ASU, until they saw her on screen. So that was great fun for them! Plus, the movie is hysterically funny, so there’s that.

So off I moved to college. I lived in an all-girls dorm so there were a LOT of girls on my floor going through rush, but neither of my roommates were among them. Rush was 7 days, so my roommates wouldn’t be moving in for another 5 days or so. We’re calling them McGonigle and Umbridge. That night the 800 or so of us headed over to the Union for orientation. And I believe this is the first time in my life I ever was intimidated by other women, or anyone for that matter. I was in a HUGE room full of women who were all beautiful, with better figures than me, seemed to be having so much more FUN than me, and in general were getting to know all the girls in the room, while I was invisible. To do this again, I’d have forced myself to put on a more laid back attitude and worked the room a bit. However, I didn’t LEARN this skill until I was in a sorority, so it couldn’t help me at this point.

Next to come: RUSH starts!