Sorority Interest Group

[HannahBanana612]

Hey, I kinda disappeared for a while. Just as an update on what's going on if anyone cares to know lol. I underestimated how stressful and time consuming this was going to be because the beginnings were so easy. I discovered that personal crises and work and school all intersect to make these types of activities twice as hard as they might have been. I won't make the mistake of underestimating again that's for sure! I lost many of my beginning members due to personal conflicts and girls transferring to new schools. I lost touch with the girls who stayed because I got so wrapped up in trying to get back on my feet. I almost gave up. Then I remembered why I was doing this, I remembered that there are girls who want a sorority to be in but the sororities here just can't accommodate the amount of girls interested, these girls deserve a place to belong as well. So I went to speak with the director of greek life to see if he was still interested. The timeline was way screwed up but I was still interested in trying if he wanted me too. I discovered that due to the decision to create greek housing the sororities had voted down the idea to expand until they discover if fall recruitment goes well enough to fill the houses. Which ordinarily would seem like a bad thing for me, but projections say that recruitment should go as well as it has in past years filling the housing and reinforcing the need for another sorority to accommodate the numbers. Also, this gives me a whole other semester to get things together seeing as they will re vote based on the recruitment numbers next September. So I am going to work on getting this going again so that come September we have the numbers to look promising to potential sororities looking to expand! I apologize if that was an excessively long update I will try to keep updating as things develop!

[33girl]

Not excessively long at all!! Thanks for letting us know how things are going.

[aephi alum]

Thanks for the update.

I'll share a bit of the history of my chapter, which may give you some ideas:

In the early 1990s, a group of Jewish women at my school got together with the specific goal of bringing a chapter of AEPhi to campus. AEPhi was interested, but Panhel was not - Theta had just colonized a couple of years earlier, bringing the number of NPC sororities from 3 to 4, and bringing in a fifth NPC sorority so soon would have rocked the boat more than they were comfortable with. However, the interest group was invited to form a local sorority - and they did so. I was not one of these women; however, I rushed and joined them. About a year and a half later, we did indeed affiliate with AEPhi. All the existing actives in the local were extended bids, and all but one accepted.

If you can, you may want to take the step from being an interest group to being a local sorority. This may help bring some more coherence to your group. You can go as far as you want in terms of recruitment, in terms of the tangibles (letters, colors, symbol, mascot, etc), in terms of ritual, and in terms of social activities (which may require asking members to pay dues...).

When NPC expansion takes place, IIRC, if there is a known interest group or local sorority interested in affiliating with an NPC sorority, that group is given precedence and is allowed to express a preference of a particular NPC sorority (in our case, the preference was AEPhi, that was the only NPC that presented, and a match was made) - or they can express no preference and listen to multiple presentations.

Best of luck to you and your interest group.