A New York City Recruitment

[AGDee]

19 years after I started singing Alpha Gam songs to my baby girl in lieu of traditional lullabies, Hypo will be going through recruitment over the next 5 days.

Friday, February 1 or Saturday, February 2- Philanthropy Day (all five chapters)
Sunday, February 3- Chapter Development Day (three chapters)
Monday, February 4- Preference (two chapters)
Tuesday, February 5- Bid Day


NPC Chapters on campus: Alpha Chi Omega, Sigma Delta Tau, Delta Gamma and Kappa Alpha Theta. These chapters shall be named after some of the sites she has seen in NYC so far. There’s no sense in giving a nickname to the sorority that is recolonizing their Alpha Chapter because we all know it is AOPi. AOPi will be presenting in the first round and then dropping out until after formal recruitment is over.

Chapters:
Broadway
Tom’s Diner
The Highline
The Met

Hypo was initially ambivalent about sorority membership. She is a Barnard Woman in many ways, including distaste for some of the more superficial aspects of sorority life that she sees in the media and on certain sites that rank greeks. She also found her mom’s squirrel obsession to be a little weird. However, she also grew up in a household with a mother who took her lifelong membership very seriously as a national volunteer and witnessed first-hand the lasting bonds built through sorority membership.

As with any deferred recruitment, Hypo has met sorority women from the chapters through numerous other activities including marching band, political activities, classes, volunteer experiences and work. She seems to have run into more women from one particular chapter than the others and wonders if this is a “sign” but is going into recruitment an open mind and heeding recommendations from her mother and Panhellenic to maximize her options. She is very open to the idea of the AOPi re-colonization because they are emphasizing leadership strongly and she knows how very special it is to be part of an Alpha Chapter re-colonization. Her exposure to a lot of sorority women at Barnard/Columbia has dispelled her early ambivalence. Although she has been very active on campus, she misses the “family” feeling she had in high school marching band and the strong bonds she had with her high school friends while far away from home. This is what she seeks from sorority membership.

Hypo is a busy girl and had some concerns about conflicts with recruitment activities. She was a little panicked that recruitment activities might conflict with her group RA interview on one day, but she got lucky and her recruitment group is attending first parties at a different time. She also decided to take two days off work so she didn’t have to worry about those potential conflicts. She has two jobs for the next month so she is juggling a lot, but one of the jobs ends at the end of February. She has a lab that goes until 7:10 pm on Bid Day and Bid Day starts at 7 pm, so that could be weird, but we’ll see how it plays out.

This won’t be posted in real time for obvious reasons.