Rushing with an Open Mind (a belated Spring 2012 recruitment story)

[greeknewbie]

So I know we’re in kind of a lull between recruitment seasons and found my recruitment notebook as I was packing things up to move out for the summer so I figured I would write this to de-stress between studying for finals and packing. I’m a longtime lurker on the forum, and I do have another account, but I very rarely post.

I’m a rising sophomore at a medium-sized university. The greek scene here is about 25% of the undergrad population, but I didn’t see it that much first semester prior to rushing (we practice winter/delayed recruitment) aside from occasional large philanthropy events that were highly publicized. We have seven sororities, and the number of women going through recruitment has been steadily increasing over the last couple of years, and this year was an all-time high. Our recruitment happens in three rounds: open-house days, skit day, and then preferences day.

***I would like to ask if you know which school I attend to please not post it. Thank you!!***

I signed up for recruitment very last minute, so I wasn’t very gung-ho about going greek. At the time, I didn’t know anyone in my family was greek, though I later found out my grandfather was in a fraternity way back when. And like I said, I didn’t actively know or research our greek life in any way prior to going through recruitment, but I had heard some minor things about all of them.

I love reading fashion magazines, and I keep finding them around my room in weird places as I clean, so I’m going to use their names as aliases for our sororities.

Elle and Marie Claire were the only ones I had heard continuously good things about. I did not personally know anyone in either sorority, but no one had said one bad thing about them, in comparison to others.

Nylons were the school’s party girls.

InStyle were the new girls on campus and had a reputation for being a little weirder and most open to taking everyone.

Vogue girls were blonde. A girl I knew and intensely disliked had made it very clear to everyone around her that she was going to be a Vogue because she is a legacy.

Glamour is known as the Jewish house, even though my campus tends to be very Jewish so that's not saying very much. A family friend who I’d spoken to a couple of times is a member of this chapter.

I hadn’t heard anything about Harper’s Bazaar. At all. Which I didn’t know if it was a good thing or bad thing.

We recruit right after winter break, so we got back, unpacked, and then met up with our gamma chi groups to get dinner. We’d all gotten together once prior to leaving for winter break, and I was lucky to be in a group with two of my really good friends. Our gamma chis basically just told us not to worry about anything and get a good night’s sleep because we had busy days ahead. My roommate was also going through recruitment as well so we tried not to freak out and got some shut eye.