If I said that I'd known all my life that I would go Greek, I would be lying. In fact, I didn't even
think about Greek life until my first semester of my freshman year, when I passed a table on my way to class and a girl waved me over to ask if I'd thought about sorority life at all. Call me stupid, but I hadn't. She was really nice and answered my questions, helped me fill out my recruitment registration sheet, and sent me on my way with a booklet of information.
I didn't really give what I signed up for much thought until later that night, when I was back in my room and my roommate Alison and I were settling down to watch a movie. She noticed the booklet peeking out of my bag and asked what it was. I brought it out and told her, and she made a face - sort of an "Oh, you too?" kind of thing. A high school friend of hers had registered for recruitment earlier in the week and was trying to get her to do it along with her, but she wasn't interested. She said she hadn't pegged me as someone interested in sororities and said that she hoped I wouldn't go all "Greek-crazy" during recruitment week. We watched the movie, but I'd seen it before and was only half paying attention - I kept flipping through the recruitment booklet to read up on the chapters. Oh, there were dress codes for each of the days, too... I felt glad that I'd brought more than just jeans and T-shirts along with me.
Fast forward to orientation.
There were
so many girls. I mean, I knew Greek life was present on campus - after signing up, I'd noticed a lot of girls wearing Greek letter shirts or carrying totes with letters on them (I'd taken astronomy in high school, and our teacher had us memorize the Greek alphabet because of naming conventions). But I hadn't realized that there were quite so many people who were interested.
I was like, "
Oh my gosh, there has to be hundreds of us, how are we going to find where we fit in at just six places???" Silly me!
Our orientation was sort of a mini-introduction to Greek Life and an overview of each chapter; it sort of felt like a lot of what was covered, was what had been in our recruitment booklets. They went over the dress codes for each round, too, with a different girl coming up onstage in what would be considered acceptable for each party. Then they introduced our recruitment counselors - they called them something different at my school, but I usually see them called Rho Chis here, so I'll just go with that to make it easier to remember.
There were four rounds: Open House, when you could visit every chapter; Heritage, when you could visit up to five chapters; Philanthropy, when you could visit up to four chapters; and Preference, when you could visit up to two. Bid Day was the day after Preference, but because of classes, the ceremonies weren't going to be starting until evening.
Then, each of the Rho Chis called out groups of girls. These were going to be our recruitment groups, though we were cautioned that as time went on our schedules weren't going to match up perfectly. Mine was a group of nine other girls, plus me - ten in total, eleven if you counted Mandy, our Rho Chi. We introduced ourselves, talked about our hopes for recruitment, and listened to Mandy as she explained that while we were looking to find a chapter full of girls that would become our sisters, the girls we were doing this with could also be our sisters as well, so we should try to get along and support each other. She was probably required by Panhellenic to say it, but I think it's a good sentiment nonetheless.
A couple of the girls in my Rho Chi group tried to guess which chapter Mandy was from. Her answer to everything was "Maybe!" - no hesitation or any other verbal or visual cues. After that, we exchanged phone numbers, decided on where we'd meet Mandy the next day, and hung out for about an hour before a passing professor reminded us that we had homework that needed doing.
I'm not sure how much sleep the others got that night, but I know I had trouble falling asleep - Alison finally threw a pillow across the room at me and said she'd be investing in a pair of earplugs, if I remember correctly.
Her snores were a lot louder than my tossing and turning, but I tried to stay quiet until I finally drifted off to sleep.
Ready or not, recruitment, here I come...
Threaded Mode
