Does it hurt your chances if you wait till spring semester to rush?

[gruber]

First off, I totally agree with Shinerbock. If you are waiting for spring semester, totally hang out with the pledges & brothers of which ever house your interested in. As others have mentioned in other threads, once your in, your in for life. Might as well make sure these guys are the ones you really want to spend the rest of your college (& beyond?) years with. And as was mentioned, being friends with them shows you are seriously interested in joining them, etc & may increase your chances of getting a bid.

As far as the rest of it goes... As has been said, each school is slightly different. Plus, my experience will be different than others here. Fall semester here I got the required 12 credits & whatever min. GPA requirements out of the way (some fraternities (& I assume sororities as well) do "bend the rules" some & allow first semesters in, just no officially on the books). But instead of going to a social fraternity, I joined up with an honors fraternity (Phi Sigma Pi). We're just as active as a social & do pretty much everything socials do - except for mixers. I don't know about the social greek scene, but generally, for us anyway, we usually get larger turn out for rush in spring.

I pledged in with a large class (I think we started around 20, but had dwindled down to about 15 when we were finally inducted. We were a slightly larger class than is usually taken, but to compare spring to fall, for example, this semester we just inducted 5 new brothers the other weekend, out of I believe like 10 people who showed up for rush.

But I'm now also apart of the Kappa Sigma fraternity (since PSP is honors it technically doesn't count in the whole 1 fraternity only rule). We're still a colony, just got our official start with nationals at the end of Oct. But we managed to get close to 60 guys together to be part of our founding fathers class... Of course this isnt exactly a typical semester for us so I cant exactly speak for the social scene still.

But yeah, speaking from my unique experience, it doesn't matter too much if you pledge spring or fall. Just make sure you find the fraternity that is best suited for yourself and go for it.