One more before the real thing...

[AnatraAmore]

Okay, so I can’t resist… what’s one more, right? And Auburn is still a week away! So here goes…

The year is 2003 and little sangers has just moved into her first choice school… 700 miles away from home. Her roommate, who we’ll call Carrie is the sweetest thing and we’re having a great time exploring the area of this Northeastern area school. We were living in a community for our major, so we were surrounded by Political Science majors. Everyone was very nice, but both of us were getting sick of the nightly debates and really needed to get out and make some friends outside of our floor who didn’t want to debate everything! I had joined a traveling club sports team, but still felt out of place and Carrie wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. About a week after classes start, Carrie mentions that she’s thinking about going through sorority recruitment. Recruitment?!?!! What is that? After reading a pamphlet we picked up about sororities, we decide to go to the mandatory meeting in hopes of learning more. I should mention that no one in my family has gone away to college before me and most of my family didn’t even know what a sorority or fraternity was.

At the meeting, we learned a little bit about the 8 NPC sororities on campus and how recruitment would work. The following Monday, we would meet in the ballroom and be put into our Rho Chi groups. The schedule would be as follows.

Monday: 8 chapters / Open House
Tuesday: 6 chapters / Philanthropy
Wednesday: 4 chapters / Skit or Slideshow Night
Thursday: 2 chapters / Pref
Friday: Bid Night

I’m going to name the chapters after my all-time favorite childhood TV show: The Carebears!

Funshine
Harmony
Laugh-a-Lot
Love-a-Lot
Cheer
Champ
Bedtime
Share

There were roughly 300 women signed up to go through recruitment and everyone couldn’t stop talking about how excited they were! Carrie and I went back to our room and analyzed every detail of the booklets we’d gotten. We searched the National and local websites for the chapters. As we were obsessing over all this, our RA (who we’ll call Becky) came by to say hi and learned that she was a Funshine! After prying as many details as possible out of her (since she said that she really wasn’t supposed to be talking about it to us…) we left her alone and called our parents. My parents were shocked, but strangely supportive of the idea. (They hadn’t heard much about them, but not shockingly, everything they had heard was pretty negative…) Carrie’s parents on the other hand, were ecstatic! She hadn’t realized, but she was a double legacy to both Bedtime and Share! Her parents hadn’t wanted to push her to go Greek, but both had been members in college, although neither was a particularly involved alumnae. Carrie’s mother and grandmother were both Bedtimes and her older sister and aunt were Shares! Wow! By the end of the night, we had heard from all four of them and gotten advice and tips on what to wear, things to talk about, how to make ourselves stand out, etc. Neither one of us slept that night, we were so excited… if only we’d known what we were getting ourselves in to!