Smells Like An Early '90s Retro Rush

[wildcat95]

Just as hair bands were giving way to grunge, I went through Rush at a large Midwestern University, we’ll call it, MWU. Rush was fairly competitive at my campus. I was not very familiar with Greek life. None of my close family had been Greek, just a few distant relatives and family friends, so I really knew nothing. I wasn’t really planning to rush, but my mom, who had always wanted to go to college, but couldn’t afford it growing up, thought it would be a great way to meet people prior to school starting as rush took place the week before school started. So that’s the attitude I took: great if it works out, but if nothing else, I’ll meet some people. My older sister had two friends (OSF#1 and #2) who were in houses at MWU. They both were great about answering my questions. OSF #1 was very panhellenic about the whole thing, saying the best house is the one where I felt I could be myself. OSF #2 was a little more specific about telling me that one of the houses was facing closure and I might want to avoid that, but didn’t name names. They put me in touch with my hometown alumnae panhellenic, which took care of recs for me, and who hosted a great rush workshop. Although I was armed with a bit of info, I still went into not sure if this was really for me.

At the time I rushed, there were 12 houses at MWU:

Alpha Chi Omega
Alpha Delta Pi
Alpha Xi Delta
Chi Omega
Delta Delta Delta
Gamma Phi Beta
Kappa Alpha Theta
Kappa Delta
Kappa Kappa Gamma
Pi Beta Phi
Sigma Kappa
Sigma Sigma Sigma

I’ll name them after the 12 months of the year in the order that I visited them in the first round.

I knew only one other person from home going through rush, a friend of mine named Erin. When my parents dropped me off at MWU for rush, I was assigned a dorm room and roommate specifically for rush. I’d move into my actual room and meet my real roommates after rush. My rush roommate, Joanie, had an older sister who was an active member of October, so she knew much more than I did. My rush counselor was nice, we met our rush group, we had an orientation, and that evening it was on with the show.