A Yummy Slightly Old Recruitment Journey

[greekmom2]

My daughter, who I’ll call Brooke for this story, went through recruitment for the first time a little over three years ago. A while back she started to write her story but stopped for whatever reason. She gave me permission to write it as long as I 1) waited quite a while and 2) let her read it before I posted anything. Since I have some time over Thanksgiving and there haven’t been many of these lately, I thought now would be an okay time to post this.


First I need to say that although there are two recruitment stories here, this is less about the recruitments than about how she went from a girl with zero interest in sorority life to active member. Along the way she and I both learned a lot. She learned it mostly through hard experience – I learned it on here. I’ve coded everything including my regular user name. I will reveal some of it at the end. Some will remain coded (but you are always free to PM me with guesses once I reveal my usual user name, and I will own up).


Despite my efforts to edit, the story is pretty long, but it is all written, so I promise to put the installments up quickly and finish by Saturday or Sunday at the latest.


Background


We live in a laid-back region. We don’t get worked up about anything….well, maybe a few things…recycling comes to mind….maybe bike paths….yeah, that about covers it.


In spite of our relaxed attitudes, the two largest public schools in our state, Metropolitan University and Party State, had good size Greek systems that kind of dominated the social scene at one (Party State) and figured prominently at the other. Recruitment was competitive but not cutthroat. Lots of girls went through, recs were unusual, most were pretty open minded, and everyone she knew got placed somewhere. She knew a few girls who decided to drop but no one who was cut entirely. That’s not to say it didn’t happen – she just didn’t personally know anyone who had it happen.


Brooke had a number of friends who were talking about rushing spring of her senior year. She had no interest, and since neither her father nor I had ever considered it in college, we didn’t care.


She had applied to only one school – Party State. We had concerns because…well the name sums it up, but it had a strong reputation in her field of interest, and it was only 1 ½ hours from Family-Friendly City where we were living, so we tried to get past the other part of its reputation. Then we found out her father was taking a job in a neighboring state, and we were soon going to be moving 6 hours away which was a slight concern since she was the baby of the family.


She did decide to try out for the cheer squad at Party State and made it rather easily (ruling out the University of Kentucky- LOL). She figured that would be her sisterhood.