Some thoughts about "I didn't feel a connection" and the stronger recruiting chapters

[1964Alum]

Originally Posted by 33girl

I’m going to make this about me for a minute. :-D

I was one of those shy, sheltered girls. Too many people in my HS didn’t realize I had grown and changed since 7th grade. Or maybe I was just a flavor they didn’t care for. At any rate, you could count the number of dates I’d been on and parties I attended on one hand.

When I got to college it was a wonderful new start. There was a great mix of girls on my dorm floor and I felt liked and accepted without trying too hard or pretending I was someone I was not. That year before I pledged a sorority helped me to grow and be confident about my choices.

However - if I had been thrown into sorority rush at our school before even having a class or meeting people, I’m sure all I would have cared about is “which sorority will make me popular?” whether it was a fit for me or not. And if I had been rejected from that chapter, it would have just been further confirmation to me that I was a geek who was never going to have a social life - even if I had met other chapters who had liked me as I was.

It’s easy to look from our vantage point and tell girls to give a chapter a chance. It’s harder if you jump back into your own 17-18 year old self.

Mine was/is a strong recruiting chapter, as was my other pref. But here's the thing. No mater whether you get your first choice or your initial last, it takes a lot of time and working with your sisters before you establish the strong bonds we all are looking for. My strongest bonds didn't come until we were all living in the house together, and even then, the ones I became closest to were not sisters I would have initially predicted would be my best friends. Our rush was deferred for a year, which gave us PNMs as well as the sororities more time to look each other over. So a lot of the sorting went on beforehand, and we had a better idea of the "personalities" of the individual chapters before the first open house. Even so, the dynamics of each house changes at least somewhat over time, so there is more fluidity within each group which one initially might imagine. The "feeling it" IMO doesn't come in a genuine way until much later and also depends on the extent that each member is wiling to put the work into it.