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I ultimately got my first choice on my bid card, but I struggled a lot during recruitment and had a lot of hard cuts (my story is around here somewhere). I loved my chapter, but we struggled, and it was tough to go through the heartbreak of not making quota every year.
Last fall, my collegiate chapter closed. This was more than eight years after I graduated, but we'd struggled with numbers since before I was even there. I was sad, and it brought up a lot of sad feelings about being in the chapter that, ultimately, nobody else wanted to be in. And I'm totally embarrassed to admit, more than twelve years after I ranked my final pref houses, I actually felt some regret and thought to myself that maybe I should have made a different choice.
But then I also thought about the fact that, in my chapter, I was essentially a "big fish". When I say we struggled with numbers, we were still over a hundred women, and I held virtually every office I wanted to hold, had a lot of friends, and when I spoke at chapter meetings, people listened to me. So, while I had to get over the ego blow of being in a less-popular chapter, I got to be a leader in that chapter.
I'm not a charismatic person. I'm definitely an introvert, and I build relationships one at a time, not by being the center of attention in a big group. I really think that I would have gotten lost in the crowd in a chapter full of really outgoing women. It was easy to think, as I was going through rush, that if I was in a chapter with all these really cool girls, I'd be a really cool girl too. But with the wisdom of age (HA!), it's pretty clear that I would have just been the awkward introvert in a chapter full of cool girls.
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