A Very Vera Recruitment Story! :)

[APhiO&ADPiGal]

Hello! I've been an anonymous lurker on this site for about a year now, but I finally decided to come out of ninja status and post my recruitment story. I hope it's useful for women who are considering Greek life, but are very much on the fence! (like I was back then!)

A quick blurb about my school and its Greek system:
- We're a smaller place, with about 1,200 students total. Somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of women on campus are members of a sorority.
- We have deferred recruitment, occurring at the start of the spring semester in February.
- We do not have a highly competitive recruitment (I'd never even heard of recs before I started looking at this site!)
- Recruitment's Structure:
Night 1: Philanthropy
Night 2: Skit
Night 3: Preference
Day 4: Bid Day!
- There are 4 sororities on campus, which will be codenamed using random Vera Bradley patterns!

Lime's Up
Sun Valley
Indigo Pop
Summer Cottage

And a bit of background about me/how I felt about Greek life going into recruitment:
Back then, I was a shy freshman who had a really awkward roommate situation and was absolutely awful at making new friends. I was lonely and had far too much time alone on my hands - I wanted to get out there and DO something during college!

Coming into college, I really had no idea what the big deal was with Greek life. While my family supported my choice to Go Greek, they were concerned about the financial and time commitments involved. I was the first person in my family to ever join a GLO, so I didn't really have a ton of background knowledge going in. Also, there happened to be a large clique of women from my high school who all went through recruitment at a nearby state school. Honestly, they were stuck up prats who were more interested in adding a list of items to their resumes and wearing letters around campus. (as opposed to investing themselves in the values of their organizations and making meaningful connections with sisters) It wasn't really a good supplement to that lack of knowledge about Greek organizations in general.

However, because my school has deferred recruitment, I was able to get a look into how Greek life worked on my campus - fortunately for me! During orientation week, my group's guide was a Greek woman. She was classy, intelligent, friendly, and funny - in short, not at all what I expected. (And two years later, I had the honor of working with her on a recruitment counselor team for upperclassmen women!) From there on, I met so many women in my college's community who were service-minded and were genuinely interested in getting involved on campus. When the time to register rolled around, I decided to jump in headfirst and see where the rabbit hole led me!