I joined Iota Omega in Spring of 1999 and I had the best time ever. In fact, 2 of my chapter sisters were bridesmaids in my wedding and I met probably my best friend of all time through Zeta (who is now working on campus) When I joined there was a pretty bad attitude in general among the chapter members. This is my take on what happened and what is
happening now. When I joined our chapter was on the cusp of either really starting to "make it" or crashing and burning and I think IO sensed this. We had just come off of a great recruitment class (not to brag or anything
), a Presidents Cup win, and the year before we had won Greek Week after being matched up with Pike, who was a new chapter on the move at that point. SO....IO decides to come in in the Fall of '99 with this idea that we are going to do a special recruitment and double the size of our chapter in one semester. The problem was that A) We did this in the fall, when the only people eligible to join chapters are sophomores or Freshman with AP credits, which stands to reason that most people did not elect to join a chapter the semester before, and usually for a reason. At that time, informal recruitment was pretty low on the radar. I know in the past few years it has been wildly successful and B) I really dont think we were given all the support that this would have needed to take off. So we publicized to the whole greek community that we would be double the size in a few short months. Well this failed, and our spirits were crushed, and we generally looked stupid to the whole greek community. Gamma Phi Beta also decided to recolonize that spring, and they were perenially "the worst house" (I dont want to sound harsh or nasty, but thats what
perceptions were at the time. The greek cimmunity at the time was pretty cutthroat and snarky at the time. I knew several Gamma Phis and they were truly awesome girls) So someone had to take the spot, and we had generally bad additudes at this point, so we kind of stopped trying, so the low spot on the totem pole was bestowed on us.
So after all this, there was a core group in the house (which was mostly comprised of my graduating class) that decided that we were not just going to crash and burn so we worked our collective BUTTS off to try to recruit great new members "with the whole package" And I think that succeeded. We brought the girls into the chapter that *really* had the resources to make
permanent changes to the attitude of the chapter in general. At the time, we kind of liked being small. We were all SUPER close. There were no cliques. We percieved ourselves to be the "non sorority sorority" But we all know you cant play baseball on a soccer feild, so we worked to change that. SO.....just my 2 cents....yeah........
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