Excited for Recruitment!

[zetatheta]

Hi! So I'm new to Greek Chat...and really excited for recruitment. (our formal recruitment is held in the Spring--and that is the first opportunity for first year students at my school to join a greek organization)
Reading all of these threads makes me want to share my story.

My School is small, and Greek Life is not very prominent... I'm sure that you'll be able to guess my school--but if you do guess anything please don't ruin the fun!

I was a sophomore when I decided to go greek. I never had any intentions of joining a sorority, and I'd never met anyone who decided to go greek. Actually one of my close friends was experiencing some difficult times and feeling the need to find a close knit group. She randomly decided that she wanted to go to recruitment---and dragged me with her!

So a little bit of background...I went through informal, fall recruitment, and at my school, for informal recruitment they have 4 nights of recruitment. The first night is a general overview of greek life, followed by two nights of open parties, you attend all four parties. The last night of recruitment is preference night and the pnms can attend all or just one party (no invitations necessary and there is no ranking) a pnm can receive multiple bids--which they get on the day after the preference party.

There are four sororities at my school (coded of course):

The Stars
The Stripes
The Circles
and The Triangles

Since I was a sophomore, I already knew a little bit about each sorority...pros, cons, and had already established outsider opinions about them....I think I will share those as well...
Julie's (my friend going through recruitment with me) roommate at the time was a Star, and actually lived on the sorority floor. The Stars are a very small and close-knit group of girls. They had won "Closest Sisterhood" for several years in a row. Julie was close with many of the girls, and liked them. I also knew, from hearing about Julie living with them, that they were not very nice to their "pledges." However, The Stars had a bad reputation on our campus. They were seen as the girls who did not receive bids to other sororities, "the left-over girls." They were also seen as having bad habits and girls who partied a little too hard. I would like to say that it is obvious that every sorority has stereotypes, and that not all of them are true. I personally, after meeting these girls over the course of the year did not think that they deserved such a mean stereotype, and although some of their reputation is true, these girls are much more than some people make them out to be.
One of my friends and Julie's best friends was a Triangle. I based a lot of my knowledge of the sorority on her and her experiences. While she had a very difficult pledging process, I also had heard from her that the sorority had recently had elections and had completely changed their new member process to make it completely free of hazing. The triangles had, for the last five years or so, been recognized as one of the best sororities on campus. It was almost always at or over total...Just about every pnm always wants to be a Triangle (they really know how to recruit) and very few are able to join because of how competitive it is. I was pretty confident that I would get along really well with all of the Triangles because I knew a lot of them. Also--the Stars and the Triangles do not get along, and Julie's roommate and her sisters did not like the Triangle organization--something about which I could only understand later.
I knew a couple of Stripes from classes and organizations on campus, and though they were nice to me, I knew that they were sometimes very caddy and tended to look down on people. The Stripes had a reputation on campus of being one of the best sororities on campus. They were also said to have loose morals---and I wasn't sure that I would fit in with them.
The last house on campus, the circles, I knew only from reputation. I had heard a couple things about this house--It was said that they were (like the Stars) a "left over" sorority, that they were not very pretty. I had personally heard from one of my close friends that the Circles were the only sorority on Campus that he respected.
....

So from the informational night, I learned the sorority's letters, symbols, and was introduced (in a group setting) to the presidents and the girls who were in charge of recruitment in each sorority. It was interesting to see who was going through recruitment. I knew a couple of girls (beside my best friend). Afterward, my best friend, who was close with a lot of Triangles, told me that she really liked the Circles because of a Greek Competition she had seen them in. I really liked the Triangles the best because I knew so many of them already. Julie and I were both really excited for the nights to follow....