Quote:
Originally Posted by Sciencewoman
Here's where I'm coming from: I transferred to a chapter that had low numbers and was really struggling. We were always informally recruiting. It took a lot of time and energy...energy that really should have been spent on our studies. When I was a 5th year senior, our International President came and told the chapter that IC had voted to reorganize and all the members would be given alumnae status. That was absolutely awful. It didn't affect me "personally" -- I still had my initiating chapter and I was graduating. But, I felt so guilty about the younger women we'd just initiated and who now had no chapter...and would instead see new women wearing our letters the next fall. Many of them transferred to other schools before the fall. At Convention last year, I told the then President that I was sitting in front of her when she came and made that announcement, and we both cried. I loved my affiliate chapter and I love my sisters, but I honestly wouldn't want my daughter to have to go through this.
Thankfully, RFM means this doesn't happen so much anymore. I don't care about tiers...find your home. But I honestly have to say that I'd be equally concerned about my daughter joining a group that faced significant struggles that go beyond "tent talk" -- my first priority would be to my daughter, not the long term status of a chapter to which I had no connection. If she did join a seriously struggling chapter, I'd do everything I could to help.
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I was in a WRC, and we had to constantly COB, and so on, but I still think it's hard to say what "small" is or how it affects an experience from the outside. My chapter was "small" because we had about 110 women, when total was about 145, and the biggest chapters were hitting 200.
Do I feel my experience was all that different from the big guys on my campus? Not at all. More stressful during recruitment season, probably, but still large enough that we functioned just like any other chapter. We had a two-year live-in requirement when some chapters only had one, but I liked living in the house, and it was way cheap to do so.
So, while I respect the desire not to join an "about-to-close" chapter, I think that rumors and bad GPA are a far cry from "about-to-close".
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