A Winter Recruitment Story

[owlet]

Hi, all! I've frequented GreekChat for a few years and have especially loved reading everyone's recruitment stories! I'm out of college now and my school is starting its recruitment soon which is making me nostalgic so I decided to finally post my own story.

(As a preface, I tend to ramble a bit about my reasons for going through recruitment/my thoughts going into the process, which I feel is just as much a part of my story, but if you are more interested in the going to the houses part, then feel free to skip over the first part!)

My school is a medium-sized school, not in the South, with about 1/3 of the students going Greek. So it’s large in that sense, but Greek life in no way dominates campus culture aside from maybe the party scene for freshmen and sophomores. Also many people involved in Greek life are also very involved in other groups on campus as well, and my school is a good school academically so most people are very focused on their studies, so even within Greek life, I would say Greek life does not dominate most people’s lives but rather helps shape them. This was a plus for me.

I never considered joining a sorority when I entered college. But my school does winter recruitment, so I had plenty of time to get a feel for what Greek life was like on my particular campus and see the potential benefits of it. I was still on the fence though—I made a few good friends and a number of acquaintances, so I didn’t feel like I needed friends per se. I also already joined a few campus groups, so I didn’t need to feel more involved on campus. And one of those groups gave me what I was mainly looking for in a sorority—genuine friends among a larger group of acquaintances that I could trust to be there for me if I needed and could provide me with both fulfilling and fun activities.

Also, none of my good friends were doing recruitment, so that made it harder for me to decide to give it a go, but I did have some acquaintances doing recruitment so I wouldn't feel totally alone in the process.

So in the end I decided to give Greek life a try because I couldn’t see any negative to expanding my social circle, and I figured I might as well check it out through recruitment before ruling out what could be a great addition to my time at school.

I tend to be a quieter, less naturally outgoing person, so I usually don’t become fast friends with people or make friends everywhere I go. So what appealed to me most about being in a sorority was the idea of a sisterhood and having a group of like-minded women who I would be around enough to become friends with but also to always know are there and I could count on as a friend. Similarly, I liked the idea of a house (all NPC sororities on my campus have a house) where I could go and feel welcome and have people around to talk to or do things with. I specifically did not want a big aspect of my future potential chapter to be frat parties, though; I had actually partied quite a bit in my time at school so far but I knew that I could keep going to parties regardless of whether I was in a sorority/which sorority I was in. What I wanted was a chapter where if I chose to stay in on a Friday night, I wouldn’t be the only one in the house. (I know this could be true of all chapters, but there are definitely chapters that do have more of a balance/swing one way or the other.)

Now onto actual recruitment. Even though it’s winter recruitment, in the fall there is what is like an orientation day, where PNMs go to all the houses for about 15 minutes each. PNMs don’t make any rankings after this, and in the winter you still start off with Round 1 where you see all the houses. This day is optional. I think Panhellenic says it’s recommended so that PNMs can get a feel for the recruitment process and get an earlier chance to check out the chapters, but I don’t think they say anything in regards to being recommended to increase your chances in actual recruitment. Though naturally, making two good impressions is better than making just one. I decided not to do this round because I wasn’t committed at this point to doing recruitment so I didn’t care as much about the benefits of an extra recruitment day. Also I was gone that weekend and would have just gotten back in time for it to start, so it would have made for a really busy weekend. Looking back, I should have done it to get a feel for what the parties were like as I felt a bit in over my head when real recruitment came around. Plus an extra chance to see each house would have been useful.

I should also add that the recruitment process was promoted as less competitive than what the typical idea of sorority recruitment is/how it may be at large state schools or Southern schools. They tell you that if you maximize your options, there is a 99 percent chance you will get a bid. I think this is what ultimately made me decide to do it—I wouldn’t have the embarrassment of trying and failing. If I rushed, I could be in a sorority; I could worry about whether I wanted to do Greek life and which chapter instead of worrying about getting in at all. All the chapters were more or less similar to me at this point, so I didn’t have my sights set on any specific one.

Recs are also not required (per Panhellenic). I don’t think I even knew what exactly a rec was, so I didn’t have any. Maybe this factored in at some houses for the first round if I was on the fence of whether to be cut or not, but I really think when they say recs are optional, they mean that. I didn’t hear any talk of them from RCs or PNMs. In retrospect I guess I should’ve had my aunt (who was in Breckenridge at a different school) write one because that would’ve been easy enough and certainly wouldn’t have hurt, but I don’t think it would have changed anything.

I didn’t know much about the specific sororities going into recruitment, but I did have some vague impressions: (Chapters named after ski mountains because I love to ski! And significant people named after characters in my favorite TV show Friends)

A-Basin- No impression of this chapter
Aspen- Known for going out a lot but I don’t remember if I knew that at the time
Aspen Highlands- I knew a girl in this chapter who was very nice. I really only knew her through a club through and we weren’t friends outside of that
Breckenridge- No impression
Copper- I knew a girl here who I knew a bit better, but I wouldn’t say we were friends. She was nice, though, and see was someone I could see myself being friends with.
Keystone- I had a friend, Rachel, who was in this chapter and then deactivated at the end of the year, so that soured my opinion a bit. She said she deactivated for partly financial reasons but also because she wasn’t too happy with the sisterhood, which she felt was less than other chapters. So that pretty much made me cross them off in mind, because the last thing I wanted was to end up in a chapter and not get the one thing I was really looking for. Plus they did have one of the highest dues, so even though money wasn’t an issue, I didn’t want to make being in a sorority more expensive than it had to be. But, to even out these negatives, I knew another girl, Phoebe, still in this chapter who had a great experience here. She even acknowledged the high dues and said after her freshman year she got a job so she could pay for the dues herself because her chapter meant so much to her. So that was meaningful to me, but I still gave a lot more weight to Rachel’s experience because I was friends with her (plus she was probably more my personality type in terms of making friends) while Phoebe was just an acquaintance.
Killington- I knew one girl in this chapter but not well
Okemo- One of the more party-hard chapters that I had heard of
Park City- Didn’t know anyone in this one. Reputation of being a party chapter, so I wasn’t too into it
Snowmass- I knew a girl, Monica, in this chapter decently well, who I actually talked to about Greek life when I was deciding whether to go through recruitment—not in a dirty rushing way, she focused on Greek life/recruitment in general but of course her experiences would reflect on her chapter. So I had a good impression of Snowmass going into recruitment. On the college gossip sites (ugh, I know…but I honestly did not know this was a bad thing, I thought of it as trying to get as much information as possible to make the right choice), they were ranked low in the usual social rankings but there was a sisterhood rank that put them at the top. Which was what I was focused on, so I liked that.
Steamboat- I knew a few girls in Steamboat through activities, but I didn’t know any of them very well
Vail- Didn’t know anyone. I remember, though, that their chapter website focused on their academics, so I had it in my mind that they were the smart, academic-focused chapter. So they got a plus for that in my mind. (Incidentally, their reputation was very much not this, but of course there were many smart women who were Vails so props to their marketing for showing that side of them!)

I'll post Day 1 tomorrow!