A "Seasonal" Recruitment...Retro Style

[anncarrollton]

I attended small liberal arts school in the South. There are 4 sororities and 4 fraternities on campus, and while that seems small, recruitment is fairly competitive. Tradition held that there were 3 stronger sororities and 1 weaker one, however, 2 sororities kind of “alternated” being the weaker ones. This changed in later years, and the “weaker” chapter continues to struggle to this day. This story takes place in the early 90’s, and recruitment was held the first full week of classes during fall semester. Despite the early recruitment date (and it was still called Rush back then), there was plenty of time for tent talk. Freshmen moved in a week before upper classmen and there were plenty of rumors and stories circulating, even word that two of the sororities’ current presidents had younger sisters who were going through recruitment.
Since there were 4 sororities there are 4 seasons, we’ll simply name them after the seasons:
Winter
Spring
Summer
Fall
Now, a little bit about me. I was from a really really really small town. There were under 100 in my graduating class. I had been a major geek in high school and had somehow “butterflied” over the summer and was suddenly pretty and self confident. I had not had very many friends in high school and honestly went into recruitment with the idea that if I couldn’t make friends in high school, at least rushing might provide me the opportunity to “buy” them. It sounds so silly now, but at the time, I really wanted some kind of guarantee that I’d “belong” somewhere. I knew that I wanted to join a sorority, but I had no idea how recruitment or sororities actually worked. I didn’t have any recommendations and I honestly didn’t have a clue!
But I was there, at college, finally comfortable in my skin. I had gone through orientation, met my Resident Advisor, met girls on my hall, met my insane roommate, and I was ready for rush to begin. While the various sororities weren’t allowed to reveal their affiliation, there were no restrictions on talking to people at this point (those didn’t start until everyone “affiliated”). A childhood friend called me and invited me down to her room to “talk”. Turns out she was roommates with a girl from one of the sororities and they lived on the sorority hall (there weren’t any houses). I ended up meeting a lot of those girls that night, but had NO clue as to which letters they belonged to. I knew however, that I kinda liked them and might want to be where they were.
Finally, it was time for recruitment to begin. We all were assigned Rho Chi groups. I’ll never forget that I was a “Gamma Giraffe”. We had to Rho Chi’s and were all grouped based on our place in the alphabet. I was immediately not in love with several of the girls in my group. One of them came in a near-formal dress to our first meeting (when we were supposed to be casual). I felt really out of place in my khakis and nice top. I didn’t look bad, but I sure felt out of place. I was afraid that I had already messed up, but then I saw more girls dressed more like me. That girl, we’ll call her Beth, was from a certain town where all of the girls were Falls. Every girl who had gone to our school from that town ended up in Fall, and that is where Beth was sure she was going to go. Another girl, who had long beautiful curly hair, Careen, was quite sure that she was going to be a Winter.
I felt so behind! I didn’t know anything about any of the groups. I was pretty sure that I’d be let go by all the groups the first night at that point, but off we went to our first night.