Carrying new members over summer

[adpiucf]

Angie, unless you're coming back to school with 7 members, 3 more aren't going to make a whole heck of a dent on the recruiting floor. Especially in consideration that they haven't had more than a few weeks to experience the organization. This doesn't mean they can't be good recruiters, but they need more time to experience the sorority before they can sell the sorority experience to PNM's.

In the fall, there will be a flurry of activity to get ready for recruitment and a pre-recruitment initation will just stress everyone out.

Check with your Greek adviser and regional sorority adviser to make sure that all your cards are in order if you want to extend the bids now. I wouldn't waste the effort on a CR this late in the school year-- if you have three women who would love to join, extend the bids now and have them over to the house to socialize, wear letters, learn about the responsibilities, pay the new member fee, and let them come to sisterhood events.

You can utilize them in pre-recruitment week to assist with preparations and have them at recruitment to help with duties outside of actual recruiting and membership selection (ie: run projector, serve refreshments, etc.)

Hope this helps. I empathize with wanting to feed their interest while its hot, but I think you're going to be stuck between a rock and a hard place-- being held over for 3 months may cause interest to wane and you'll lose them before the fall begins, and shortening the new member period to initiate before summer break may rob the new members time to evaluate if this is the right sorority for them, leaving you where you started plus more former members running around with knowledge of rituals.

If you're hard pressed for returning members in the fall, I'd opt to speed up the new member process so you have more initiated members on the floor and can utilize the new ones in other recruitment activities. But also consider the best scenario for keeping these 3 new girls around and motivated-- will it be worth the effort to keep courting them over the summer as NM's?