Craziest sorority or fraternity house amenities

[Diluxi]

Originally Posted by sugar and spice

Surprised we don't see more:
- Gyms
- Pools

A few (but by no means all) of the houses at USC (CA) have small exercise rooms - think a few treadmills/elliptical machines. Not surprising since there are so many gym rats at this school!

I don't know how common this is at other schools but several of the houses here also have nicely renovated roof areas for sunbathing.

That being said, most of the sorority houses here are kind of getting on in years, so they tend to add comforts where they can.

[aephi alum]

My chapter was unhoused, but a girl can dream, can't she?

Given the constraints of Boston/Cambridge, I would have liked to live in a house with:

- A roof deck with a hot tub
- A library, quiet at all times, available as a study space and also stocked with textbooks, bibles*, and various fiction genres (including plenty of sci-fi! )
- An exercise room
- PARKING!!!

*Bibles = binders, assembled by a student when s/he has finished a course, containing all the student's class notes, problem sets and answers, tests and test answers, etc. GLOs at my school kept libraries of these for future members to use as study material.

[sugar and spice]

Originally Posted by SoCalGirl

The extra liability risk usually kills the idea of having gyms and pools.

That's what I figured, but it's weird, because you'd figure that lawsuit risk would make them nonexistent, and they aren't--just rare.

[ASTalumna06]

Originally Posted by sugar and spice

That's what I figured, but it's weird, because you'd figure that lawsuit risk would make them nonexistent, and they aren't--just rare.

It's not necessarily lawsuits, but insurance companies will either run in the other direction or charge a ridiculously high premium. I admit to not knowing much about insurance for Greek orgs, but I'd have to guess they're already covered in the Surplus market and paying extremely high premiums even without pools and gyms.

[Titchou]

Most NPC groups are with the same insurance carrier....MJ Insurance...and they cover all this and more at very competitive rates.

[Sciencewoman]

Our house at Cal Poly has a pool. The house is nicknamed The Pink Palace.

[Sassmofi]

The name pink palace always makes me cringe especially for a sorority house. Another organization at an Illinois school also calls their house the pink palace.

[amIblue?]

Originally Posted by Titchou

Most NPC groups are with the same insurance carrier....MJ Insurance...and they cover all this and more at very competitive rates.

MJ Insurance is a broker. Most liability coverage is written through surplus carriers like Chubb, Ace, and Scottsdale. Standard carriers like Travelers and CNA will write property coverage for houses that are in better condition. I did run into an instance of all lines of coverage for a house at Alabama being written with EMC, which is a regional carrier.

[Sassmofi]

Originally Posted by aephi alum

*Bibles = binders, assembled by a student when s/he has finished a course, containing all the student's class notes, problem sets and answers, tests and test answers, etc. GLOs at my school kept libraries of these for future members to use as study material.

Do chapters still do this? The previous chapters I advised felt this was starting to cross over into cheating.

[DeltaBetaBaby]

Originally Posted by Sassmofi

Do chapters still do this? The previous chapters I advised felt this was starting to cross over into cheating.

Yes, enough that I just give last year's exams to all of my students, because I feel it would be unfair that some have them and others don't.

[sugar and spice]

Originally Posted by Sassmofi

Do chapters still do this? The previous chapters I advised felt this was starting to cross over into cheating.

With the onset of the internet, universities understand that it's pretty easy for even non-Greek students to acquire this information and have created policies to mitigate the advantage students who acquire it--rules against professors reusing test/homework questions, making old tests available to all students, etc. It shouldn't cross over into "cheating" unless your students are literally copying answers from old problem sets.

That said, when I was in school, a lot of sororities used their study bibles as a bragging point during recruitment, but the reality was less exciting than the advertising. Nobody wanted to take the time to maintain/organize the system, and with a school as big as ours, chances are that a comprehensive set of bibles would've taken more than one room to store! I checked a few times when I was living in the house, and I think we had notes for maybe two of the classes in my program--a program that had around 50 classes per year in it (and where classes often changed from year to year). When Greeks talk about their study bibles, I always wonder how many of them actually have a system that works, haha.

[KDKells]

I think the file system works well for smaller schools. We're primarily engineering, so nearly everyone has at least their first two years of classes in our file system. There's typically someone a year or two older who was in your major and made files so everything works out.

[clemsongirl]

We have an online Google Drive with folders sorted by subject and class that girls can upload old tests, notes, lecture slides or anything else to as well as a physical textbook library stored on our hall. I think it works well for making it accessible to everyone since you can just download or print whatever you need and there's no issues with physically keeping all the papers separated.

[Just interested]

I didn't think we had very many amenities at our House at A&M but I guess we do.
We have test files (love the idea of putting them on the internet), a small gym, free washers and dryers, a KD Cafe for late night snacks/coffee/study area. We have House boys who serve and we are very old fashioned as our House Director still sits at the head table and the House Girls all eat dinner at the same time. We still sing the Kappa Delta Grace before every meal.

[lyrica9]

Originally Posted by jolene

The mention of tanning beds in Ole Miss's ADPi house (see this thread http://www.greekchat.com/gcforums/sh...=150122&page=3) made me wonder about other crazy amenities at chapter houses. I don't know of any off hand other than the aforementioned tanning beds. C'mon! There's gotta be some other crazy ones out there. My hubby's old fraternity house had a sand volleyball court, but I don't think that's very unusual (seen them at other houses). Alpha Xi at Texas has a swimming pool.

The ADPi house at Texas also has a pool.