Short and sweet story..

[awkward1]

I have been lurking for a while and have decided that this would be a great time to post my recruitment story since we are about to start the Fall season. It will be short and sweet because this is a retro thread and my memory is not so good. I will not reveal my campus but I may call some of the sororities out by name when there is a strong memory of something outstanding that they did. It has been long enough that I don't think that there will be any issues with that, it will be all positive!

First let me tell you a little bit about myself. I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska. From the time I was 1 month old until I left for college I was an Alaskan. We would leave the state ('go outside' as we called it) once a year for vacation which was usually on the west coast. So I did have some exposure to life in the lower 48, but not a lot. My high school had roughly 1500 students, which I consider to be a medium size school. I was very active in sports, cheerleading and student council so I did not consider myself socially awkward by any means. Some of my favorite pastimes were skiing, 4 wheeling, camping, fishing and hiking. Doesn't sound too out of the ordinary, right?

In my senior year of high school I became very tired of being with the same people at school day in and day out, year after year. I decided to buck the trend of attending a west coast school and go to a place where I didn't think that I would ever run into anybody from home and headed to a big SEC school! I didn't know a single soul and had never even been in the eastern half of the US in my entire life, but I was one for adventure. When my acceptance packet arrived at my house there was some information about Greek life included in it. I didn't know what a sorority was, never met anyone who was in one, but it sounded like a fun club (I really thought this!) to be in so I filled out my rush registration and started making plans.
Packing was tough. I only had about 2 pairs of shorts because most of the year I wore jeans in Alaska. I definitely didn't have designer clothes or cute sun dresses, there just was never a need for it. So my mom bought me a couple of things that we thought appropriate and all told my belongings amounted to two suitcases and one medium box. That's it. Neither of my parents had been to college so we were clueless about what I was stepping into.
The flight was over twelve hours long. My mom and I arrived at the airport and made our way to campus where we managed to navigate the campus with lots of help from strangers. I never attended an orientation because I lived too far away and we couldn't afford it. We found my dorm and made our way to my room and met my roommate. She was so nice and easy to speak with that she just put me at ease right away. It took us maybe 20 minutes to unpack all of my luggage and set up my room. I noticed many other girls looked like they were moving their entire house into their room because they had so much stuff with them! One thing that is notable about Alaska is that the people tend to be very non-materialistic. Alaskans don't care about what you drive or what you wear or any other status symbols. It is hard to tell a lawyer or doctor from a clerk, they dress the same and drive the same vehicles. They know that all people freeze to death at the same rate no matter how much money they have, so there are better attributes to use when judging someone. For instance, does their truck have a wench? Is their long underwear silk or cotton/poly blend? Is this a person I could depend on if my heat goes out and it's 30 below?
I noticed that most of the girls seemed to know someone else in the dorm who was rushing and were pairing off. I didn't know anyone so I hung back and just observed....hmmm, it was starting to sink in that things were very different down here in the south. I still didn't really know what rush was (thank God) so I was not stressed out one bit and just didn't understand why so many girls had so much anxiety! Then it was time to meet our Rho Chi and get down to this business called rush......